She could see that the remark pleased him.  “I’ll sing ‘Zerline’ if you’ll play it.”

“You couldn’t sing ‘Zerline,’ it isn’t in your voice.”

“You don’t know what my voice is like.”

“Evelyn, I wonder how you can expect me to forgive you; I wonder how I can speak to you.  Have you forgotten how you went away leaving me to bear the shame, the disgrace?”

“I have come to beg forgiveness, not to excuse myself.  But I wrote to you from Paris that I was going to live with Lady Duckle, and that you were to say that I had gone abroad to study singing.”

“I’m astonished, Evelyn, that you can speak so lightly.”

“I do not think lightly of my conduct, if you knew the miserable days it has cost me.  Reproach me as you will about my neglect toward you, but as far as the world is concerned there has been no disgrace.”

“You would have gone all the same; you only thought of yourself.  Brought up as you have been, a Catholic—­”

“My sins, father, lie between God and myself.  What I come for is to beg forgiveness for the wrong I did you.”

He did not answer, but he seemed to acquiesce, and it was a relief to her to feel that it was not the moral question that divided them; convention had forced him to lay some stress upon it, but clearly what rankled in his heart, and prevented him from taking her in his arms, was a jealous, purely human feud.  This she felt she could throw herself against and overpower.

“Father, you must forgive me, we are all in all to each other; nothing can change that.  Ever since mother’s death—­you remember when the nurse told us all was over—­ever since I’ve felt that we were in some strange way dependent on each other.  Our love for each other is the one unalterable thing.  My music you taught me; the first songs I sang were at your concerts, and now that we have both succeeded—­you with Palestrina, and I with Wagner—­we must needs be aliens.  Father, can’t you see that that can never be? if you don’t you do not love me as I do you.  You’re still thinking that I left you.  Of course, it was very wrong, but has that changed anything?  Father, tell me, tell me, unless you want to kill me, that you do not believe that I love you less.”

The wonder of the scene she was acting—­she never admitted she acted; she lived through scenes, whether fictitious or real—­quickened in her; it was the long-expected scene, the scene in the third act of the “Valkyrie” which she had always played while divining the true scene which she would be called upon to play one day.  It seemed to her that she stood on the verge of all her future—­the mystery of the abyss gathered behind her eyes; she threw herself at her father’s feet, and the celebrated phrase, so plaintive, so full of intercession, broke from her lips, “Was the rebel act so full of shame that her rebellion is so shamefully scourged?  Was my offence so deep in disgrace that thou dost plan so deep a disgrace