“Mon Dieu! and wiz a voice!” he exclaimed, dashing his fist in a delirium of forgetfulness against the one plastered lock of hair on his shining head.  “Little fool! little dam fool!—­zat might have been”—­(Mr. Pericles figured in air with his fingers to signify the exaltation she was to have attained)—­“Mon Dieu! and look at you!  Did I not warn you? non a vero?  Did I not say ’Ruin, ruin, if you go so?  For a man!—­a voice!  You will not come to me?  Zen, hear! you shall go to old Belloni.  I do not want you, my pretty dear.  Woman is a trouble, a drug.  You shall go to old Belloni; and, crack! if ze voice will come back to a whip,—­bravo, old Belloni!”

Mr. Pericles turned to reach down his hat from a peg.  At the same instant Emilia quitted the room.

Dusk was deepening the yellow atmosphere, and the crowd was now steadily flowing in one direction.  The bereaved creature went with the stream, glad to be surrounded and unseen, till it struck her, at last, that she was moving homeward.  She stopped with a pang of grief, turned, and met all those people to whom the fireside was a beacon.  For some time she bore against the pressure, but her loneliness overwhelmed her.  None seemed to go her way.  For a refuge, she turned into one of the city side streets, where she was quite alone.  Unhappily, the street was of no length, and she soon came to the end of it.  There was the choice of retracing her steps, or entering a strange street; and while she hesitated a troop of sheep went by, that made a piteous noise.  She followed them, thinking curiously of the something broken that appeared to be in their throats.  By-and-by, the thought flashed in her that they were going to be slaughtered.  She held her step, looking at them, but without any tender movement of the heart.  They came to a butcher’s yard, and went in.

When she had passed along a certain distance, a shiver seized her, and her instinct pushed her toward the lighted shops, where there were pictures.  In one she saw the portrait of that Queen of Song whom she had heard at Besworth.  Two young men, glancing as they walked by arm in arm, pronounced the name of the great enchantress, and hummed one of her triumphant airs.  The features expressed health, humour, power, every fine animal faculty.  Genius was on the forehead and the plastic mouth; the forehead being well projected, fair, and very shapely, showing clear balance, as well as capacity to grasp flame, and fling it.  The line reaching to a dimple from the upper lip was saved from scornfulness by the lovely gleam, half-challenging, half-consoling, regal, roguish—­what you would—­that sat between her dark eyelashes, like white sunlight on the fringed smooth roll of water by a weir.  Such a dimple, and such a gleam of eyes, would have been keys to the face of a weakling, and it was the more fascinating from the disregard of any minor charm notable upon this grand visage, which could not suffer a betrayal.  You saw, and