for me?  Was this my crime so dark with dishonour that it henceforth robs me of all honour?  Oh tell me, father; look in mine eyes.”  She heard the swelling harmony, every chord, the note that gave her the note she was to sing.  She was carried down like a drowning one into a dim world of sub-conscious being; and in this half life all that was most true in her seemed to rise like a star and shine forth, while all that was circumstantial and ephemeral seemed to fall away.  She was conscious of the purification of self; she seemed to see herself white and bowed and penitent.  She experienced a great happiness in becoming humble and simple again....  But she did not know if the transformation which was taking place in her was an abiding or a passing thing.  She knew she was expressing all that was most deep in her nature, and yet she had acted all that she now believed to be reality on the stage many times.  It seemed as true then as it did now—­more true; for she was less self-conscious in the fictitious than in the real scene.

She knelt at her father’s or at Wotan’s feet—­she could not distinguish; all limitations had been razed.  She was the daughter at the father’s feet.  She knelt like the Magdalen.  The position had always been natural to her, and habit had made it inveterate; there she bemoaned the difficulties of life, the passion which had cast her down and which seemed to forbid her an ideal.  She caught her father’s hand and pressed it against her cheek.  She knew she was doing these things, yet she could not do otherwise; tears fell upon his hand, and the grief she expressed was so intense that he could not restrain his tears.  But if she raised her face and saw his tears, his position as a stern father was compromised!  She could only think of her own grief; the grief and regret of many years absorbed her; she was so lost in it that she expected him to answer her in Wotan’s own music; she even smiled in her grief at her expectation, and continued the music of her intercession.  And it was not until he asked her why she was singing Wagner that she raised her face.  That he should not know, jarred and spoilt the harmony of the scene as she had conceived it, and it was not till he repeated his question that she told him.

“Because I’ve never sung it without thinking of you, father.  That is why I sang it so well.  I knew it all before.  It tore at my heart strings.  I knew that one day it would come to this.”

“So every time before was but a rehearsal.”

She rose to her feet.

“Why are you so cruel?  It is you who are acting, not I. I mean what I say—­you don’t.  Why make me miserable?  You know that you must forgive me.  You can’t put me out of doors, so what is the use in arguing about my faults?  I am like that ... you must take me as I am, and perhaps you would not have cared for me half as much if I had been different.”

“Evelyn, how can you speak like that?  You shock me very much.”