“Yes, but father thinks I have lost my ear; I shall not sing to-night.”

Ulick laughed outright; the others looked at Evelyn amazed and a little perplexed, and the consumptive man who wore brown clothes and who had asked her to marry him came forward to congratulate her.  But while talking to him, her eyes were attracted by the tall, spare ecclesiastic who stood talking to her father.  She thought vaguely of Ulick’s depreciation.  In spite of herself she felt herself gravitating towards him.  Several times she nearly broke off the conversation with the consumptive man:  her feet seemed to acquire a will of their own.  But when her eyes and thought returned to the consumptive man, her heart filled with plaintive terror, for she could not help thinking of the little space he had to live, and how soon the earth would be over him.  She met in his eyes a clear, plaintive look, in which she seemed to catch sight of his pathetic soul.  She seemed to be aware of it, almost in contact with it, and through the eyes she divined the thought passing there, and it was painful to her to think that it was of her health and success he was thinking.  She could see how cruelly she reminded him of his folly in asking her to marry him, and she was quite sure that he was thinking now how very lucky for her it was that she had refused him.  Pictures were formulating, she could see, in his poor mind of how different her life would have been in the home he had to offer her, and all this seemed to her so infinitely pathetic that she forgot Ulick, Monsignor and everything else.  Her father called her.

“Evelyn,” he said, “let me introduce you to Monsignor.”

The sight of a priest always shocked her; the austere face and the reserved manner, the hard yet kind eyes, that appearance of frequentation of the other world, at least of the hither side of this, impressed her, and she trembled before him as she had trembled six years ago when she met Owen in the same room.  And when the concert was over, when she lay in bed, she wondered.  She asked herself how it was that a little ordinary conversation about church singing—­Palestrina, plain chant, the papal choir, and the rest of it—­should have impressed her so vividly, should have excited her so much that she could not get to sleep.

She remembered the discontent when it began to be perceived that she did not intend to sing, and how Julia had said, when it came to her to sing, that she did not dare.  Julia had fixed her eyes on her, and then everyone seemed to be looking at her.  The consumptive man was emboldened to demand “Elsa’s Dream,” but she had refused to sing for him.  She was determined that nothing would induce her to sing that night, but suddenly Monsignor had said—­

“I hope you will not refuse to sing, Miss Innes.  Remember that I cannot go to the opera to hear you.”

“If you wish to hear me, Monsignor, I shall be pleased indeed.”