Her brain seemed to melt in the moonlight, and from the enigma of the skies her thoughts turned to the enigma of her own individuality.  She was aware that she lived.  She was aware that some things were right, that some things were wrong.  She was aware of the strange fortune that had lured her, that had chosen her out of millions.  What did it mean?  It must mean something, just as those stars must mean something—­but what?

Opposite to her window there was an open space; it was full of mist and moonlight; the lights of a distant street looked across it.  She too had said, “’Tis hard upon me, I love my folk above all things, but a great longing seizes me.”  That story is the story of human life.  What is human life but a longing for something beyond us, for something we shall not attain?  Again she wondered what her end must be.  She must end somehow, and was it not strange that she could no more answer that simple question than she could the sublime question which the moon and stars propounded....  That breathless, glittering peace, was it not wonderful?  It seemed to beckon and allure, and her soul yearned for that peace as Connla’s had for the maiden.  Death only could give that peace.  Did the Fairy Maiden mean death?  Did the plains of the Ever Living, which the Fairy Maiden had promised Connla on the condition of his following her, lie behind those specks of light?

But what end should she choose for herself if the choice were left to her—­to come back to Dulwich and live with her father?  She might do that—­but when her father died?  Then she hoped that she might die.  But she might outlive him for thirty years—­Evelyn Innes, an old woman, talking to the few friends who came to see her, of the days when Wagner was triumphant, of her reading of “Isolde.”  Some such end as that would be hers.  Or she might end as Lady Asher.  She might, but she did not think she would.  Owen seemed to think more of marriage now than he used to.  He had always said they would be married when she retired from the stage.  But why should she retire from the stage?  If he had wanted to marry her he should have asked her at first.  She did not know what she was going to do.  No one knew what they were going to do.  They simply went on living.  That moonlight was melting her brain away.  She drew down the blinds, and she fell asleep thinking of her father’s choir and the beautiful “Missa Brevis” which she was going to hear to-morrow.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

As they went to church, he told her about Monsignor Mostyn.  Evelyn remembered that the very day she went away, he had had an appointment with the prelate, and while trying to recall the words he had used at the time—­how Monsignor believed that a revival of Palestrina would advance the Catholic cause in England—­she heard her father say that no one except Monsignor could have succeeded in so difficult an enterprise as the reformation of church music in England.