loni; 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 there was no effort to conceal, that the spirit animating it was
intensely human; bu