In the garden scene, she sang the first bars of the music absent-mindedly, dusting and folding her little cape, stopping when it was only half folded to stand forgetful a moment, her eyes far off, gazing back into the preceding act.  Awaking with a little start, she went to her spinning-wheel, and, with her back to the audience, arranged the spindle and the flax.  Then stopping in her work and standing in thought, she half hummed, half sang the song “Le Roi de Thule.”  Not till she had nearly finished did she sit down and spin, and then only for a moment, as though too restless and disturbed for work that afternoon.

Evelyn was glad that Ulick had remarked that the jewels were not “the ropes of pearls we are accustomed to, but strange, mediaeval jewels, long, heavy earrings and girdles and broad bracelets.”  Owen had given her these.  She remembered how she had put them on, just as Ulick said, with the joy of a child and the musical glee of a bird.  “She laughed out the jewel song,” he said, “with real laughter, returning lightly across the stage;” and he said that they had “wondered what was this lovely music which they had never heard before!” And when she placed the jewels back, she did so lingeringly, regretfully, slowly, one by one, even forgetting the earrings, perhaps purposely, till just before she entered the house.

“In the duet with Faust,” he said, “we were drawn by that lovely voice as in a silken net, and life had for us but one meaning—­the rapture of love.”

“Has it got any other meaning?” Evelyn paused a moment to think.  She was afraid that it had long ceased to have any other meaning for her.  But love did not seem to play a large part in Ulick’s life.  Yet that last sentence—­to write like that he must feel like that.  She wondered, and then continued reading his article.

She was glad that he had noticed that when she fainted at the sight of Mephistopheles, she slowly revived as the curtain was falling and pointed to the place where he had been, seeing him again in her over-wrought brain.  This she did think was a good idea, and, as he said, “seemed to accomplish something.”

He thought her idea for her entrance in the following act exceedingly well imagined, for, instead of coming on neatly dressed and smiling like the other Margarets, she came down the steps of the church with her dress and hair disordered, in the arms of two women, walking with difficulty, only half recovered from her fainting fit.  “It is by ideas like this,” he said, “that the singer carried forward the story, and made it seem like a real scene that was happening before our eyes.  And after her brother had cursed Margaret, when he falls back dead, Miss Innes retreats, getting away from the body, half mad, half afraid.  She did not rush immediately to him, as has been the operatic custom, kneel down, and, with one arm leaning heavily on Valentine’s stomach, look up in the flies.  Miss Innes, after backing far away from him, slowly returned, as if impelled to do so against her will, and, standing over the body, looked at it with curiosity, repulsion, terror; and then she burst into a whispered laugh, which communicated a feeling of real horror to the audience.