It was impossible for her to refuse Monsignor; it was out of the question that she should refuse to sing for him.  If he had wished it, she would have had to sing the whole evening.  All that was quite true, but there seemed to be another reason which she could not define to herself.  It had given her infinite pleasure to sing to Monsignor, a pleasure she had never experienced before, not at least for a very long while, and wondering what was about to happen, she fell asleep.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The music-room had seemed haunted with Owen’s voice, and yesterday she had asked Ulick to walk with her in the lanes so that she might escape from it.  But to-day half-pleased, half-perplexed by her own perversity, she could not resist taking him to the picture gallery—­she wanted to show him “The Colonnade.”

The picture was merged in shadow, and no longer the picture she remembered; but when the sun shone, all the rows quickened with amorous intrigue, and the little lady held out her striped skirt (she had lost none of her bland delight), and the gentleman who advanced to meet her bowed with the mock humility of yore, and the beautiful perspectives of the colonnade floated into the hush of the trees, and the fountain warbled.

For a reason which eluded her, she was anxious to know how this picture would strike Ulick, and she tried to draw from him his ideas concerning it.

“Their thoughts,” he said, “are not in their evening parade; something quite different is happening in their hearts....”  And while waiting for her parasol and his stick, he said—­

“I can see that you always liked that picture; you’ve seen it often before.”

She had been longing to speak of Owen.  He seemed always about them, and in phantasmal presence he seemed to sunder them, to stand jailor-like.  It was only by speaking of Owen that his interdiction could be removed, and she said that she had often been to the gallery with him.  Having said so much, it was easy to tell Ulick of the story of the three days of hesitation which had preceded her elopement.

“The Colonnade,” and “The Lady playing the Virginal,” had seemed to her symbols of the different lives which that day had been pressed upon her choice.  Ulick explained that Fate and free will are not as irreconcilable as they seem.  For before birth it is given to us to decide whether we shall accept or reject the gift of life.  So we are at once the creatures and the arbiters of destiny.  These metaphysics excited and then eluded her perceptions, and she hastened to tell him how she had stood at the corner of Berkeley Square, seeing the season passing under the green foliage, thinking how her life was summarised in a single moment.  She remembered even the lady who wore the bright irises in her bonnet; but she neglected to mention her lest Ulick should think that it was memory of this woman’s horses