“No, but it isn’t parody, that’s just what it isn’t, for it is natural to him to write in this style.  What he writes in the modern style is as common as anyone else.  This is his natural language.”  In support of the validity of his argument that a return to the original sources of an art is possible without loss of originality, he instanced the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.  The most beautiful pictures, and the most original pictures Millais had ever painted were those that he painted while he was attempting to revive the methods of Van Eyck, and the language of Shakespeare was much more archaic than that of any of his contemporaries.  “But explanations are useless.  I tried to explain to Father Gordon that Palestrina was one of the greatest of musicians, but he never understood.  Monsignor Mostyn and I understood each other at once.  I said Palestrina, he said Vittoria—­I don’t know which suggested the immense advantage that a revival of the true music of the Catholic would be in making converts to Rome.  You don’t like Ulick’s music; there’s nothing more to be said.”

“But I do like it, father.  How impatient you are!  And because I don’t understand an entire aestheticism in five minutes, which you and Ulick Dean have been cooking for the last three years, I am a fool, quite as stupid as Father Gordon.”

Mr. Innes laughed, and when he put his arm round her and kissed her she was happy again.  The hours went lightly by as if enchanted, and it was midnight when he closed the harpsichord and they went upstairs.  Neither spoke; they were thinking of the old times which apparently had come back to them.  On the landing she said—­

“We’ve had a nice evening after all.  Good-night, father.  I know my room.”

“Good-night,” he said.  “You’ll find all your things; nothing has been changed.”

Agnes had laid one of her old nightgowns on the bed, and there was her prie-dieu, and on the chest of drawers the score of Tristan which Owen had given her six years ago.  She had come back to sing it.  How extraordinary it all was!  She seemed to have drifted like a piece of seaweed; she lived in the present though it sank beneath her like a wave.  The past she saw dimly, the future not at all; and sitting by her window she was moved by vague impulses towards infinity.  She grew aware of her own littleness and the vastness overhead—­that great unending enigma represented to her understanding by a tint of blue washed over by a milky tint.  Owen had told her that there were twenty million suns in the milky way, and that around every one numerous planets revolved.  This earth was but a small planet, and its sun a third-rate sun.  On this speck of earth a being had awakened to a consciousness of the glittering riddle above his head, but he would die in the same ignorance of its meaning as a rabbit.  The secret of the celestial plan she would never know.  One day she would slip out of consciousness of it; life would never beckon her again; but the vast plan which she now perceived would continue to revolve, progressing towards an end which no man, though the world were to continue for a hundred million years, would ever know.