She had heard the Mass in Rome, and remembered the beautiful phrase which opens the “Kyrie” and which is the essence of the first part of that movement.  But the altos had not the true alto quality; they were trebles singing in the lower register of their voices.  Leaning towards her, Ulick whispered, “The altos are not quite in tune.”  She had heard nothing wrong, but, seeing that he was convinced, she resolved to submit the matter to her father’s decision.  She had every confidence in the accuracy of her ear; but last night her father had said that the modern musical ear was not nearly so fine as the ancient, trained to the exact intervals of the monochord, instead of the coarse approximation of the keyboard.

She remembered that when she had heard the Mass in Rome there was a moment when she had longed for the sweet concord of a pure third.  Now, when it came at the end of the first note of the basses, Ulick said, “It is as sharp as that of an ordinary piano.”  It had not seemed so to her, and she wondered if her ear had deteriorated, if the corrupting influence of modern chromatic music had been too strong, if she had lost her ear in the Wagner drama.  The coarse intonation was more obvious in the “Christe Eleison,” sung by four solo voices, than in the “Kyrie,” sung by the full choir; and she did catch a slight equivocation, and the discovery tended to make her doubt Ulick’s assertion that the altos were wrong in the “Kyrie,” for, if she heard right in one place, why did she not hear right in another?  The leading treble had a hard, unsympathetic voice, which did not suit the florid passages occurring three times on the second syllable of the word Eleison.  He hammered them instead of singing them tenderly, with just the sense of a caress in the voice.

But outside of such extreme criticism, in the audience of the ordinary musical ear, the beautiful “Missa Brevis” was as well given as it could be given in modern times, and Evelyn was, of course, anxious to see the great prelate to whose energetic influence the revival of this music was owing, the man who had helped to make her dear father’s life a satisfaction to him.  It was just slipping into disappointment when the prelate had come to save it.  This was why Evelyn was so interested in him—­why she was already attracted toward him.  It was for this reason she was sitting in one of the front chairs, near to where Monsignor would have to pass on his way to the pulpit.  He was to preach that Sunday at St. Joseph’s....  He passed close to her, and she had a clear view of his thin, hard, handsome face, dark in colour and severe as a piece of mediaeval wood carving; a head small and narrow across the temples, as if it had been squeezed.  The eyes were bright brown, and fixed; the nose long and straight, with clear-cut nostrils.  She noticed the thin, mobile mouth and the swift look in the keen eyes—­in that look he seemed to gather an exact notion of the congregation he was about to address.