And to bring the interview to a close, she told Merat to take away the chocolate tray, and took up one of the scores which lay on a small table by the bedside—­“Tannhaeuser” and “Tristan and Isolde.”  It would bore her to look at Elizabeth again; she knew it all.  She chose Tristan instead, and began reading the second act at the place where Isolde, ignoring Brangaene’s advice, signals to Tristan with the handkerchief.  She glanced down the lines, hearing the motive on the ’cellos, then, in precipitated rhythm, taken up by the violins.  When the emotion has reached breaking point, Tristan rushes into Isolde’s arms, and the frantic happiness of the lovers is depicted in short, hurried phrases.  The score slipped from her hands and her thoughts ran in reminiscence of a similar scene which she had endured in Venice nearly four years ago.  She had not seen Owen for two months, and was expecting him every hour.  The old walls of the palace, the black and watchful pictures, the watery odours and echoes from the canal had frightened and exhausted her.  The persecution of passion in her brain and the fever of passion afloat in her blood waxed, and the minutes became each a separate torture.  There was only one lamp.  She had watched it, fearing every moment lest it should go out....  She had cast a frightened glance round the room, and it was the spectre of life that her exalted imagination saw, and her natural eyes a strange ascension of the moon.  The moon rose out of a sullen sky, and its reflection trailed down the lagoon.  Hardly any stars were visible, and everything was extraordinarily still.  The houses leaned heavily forward and Evelyn feared she might go mad, and it was through this phantom world of lagoon and autumn mist that a gondola glided.  This time her heart told her with a loud cry that he had come, and she had stood in the shadowy room waiting for him, her brain on fire.  The emotion of that night came to her at will, and lying in her warm bed she considered the meeting of Tristan and Isolde in the garden, and the duet on the bank of sultry flowers.  Like Tristan and Isolde, she and Owen had struggled to find expression for their emotion, but, not having music, it had lain cramped up in their hearts, and their kisses were vain to express it.  She found it in these swift irregularities of rhythm, replying to every change of motion, and every change of key cried back some pang of the heart.

This scene in the second act was certainly one of the most difficult—­at least to her—­and the one in which she most despaired of excelling.  It suddenly occurred to her that she might study it with Ulick Dean.  She had met him at rehearsal, and had been much interested in him.  He had sent her six melodies—­strange, old-world rhythms, recalling in a way the Gregorian she used to read in childhood in the missals, yet modulated as unintermittently as Wagner; the same chromatic scale and yet a haunting of the antique rhythm in the melody.  Ulick knew