him.  No, not even for the sake of her immortal soul would she do anything that would give him pain.  But he had been anxious to marry her for some time.  Would she make him a good wife?  She was fond of him; she would do anything for him.  She had travelled hundreds of miles to see him when he was ill, and the other night she could not sleep because she feared he was unhappy about his mother’s health.  She would marry him if he asked her.  On that point she was certain.  Refuse Owen?  Not for anything that could be offered her; nothing would change her from that.  Nothing!  Her resolve was taken.  No, it was not taken; it was there in her heart.

And at the moment when the Elevation bell rang she decided not only to accept Owen if he asked her, but to use all her influence to induce him to ask her.  This seemed to her equivalent to a resolution to reform her life, and, happier in mind, she bowed her head, and as a very unworthy Catholic, but still a Catholic, and feeling no longer as an alien and an outcast, she assisted at the mystery of the Mass.  She even ventured to offer up a vague prayer, and when the dread interval was over, she remembered that her father had spoken to her of the second “Agnus Dei” as an especially beautiful number.  It was for five voices; exquisitely prayerful it seemed to her.  With devout insistence the theme is reiterated by the two soprani, then the voices are woven together, and the simile that rose up in her mind was the pious image of fingers interlaced in prayer.

The first thrill, the first impression of the music over, she applied herself to the dissection of it, so that she might be able to discuss it with Ulick and her father afterwards.  This beautiful melody, apparently so free, was so exquisitely contrived that it contained within itself descant and harmony.  She knew it well; it is a strict canon in unison, and she had heard it sung by two grey-haired men in the Papal choir in Rome, soprano voices of a rarer and more radiant timbre than any woman’s sexful voice, and subtle, and, in some complex way, hardly of the earth at all—­voices in which no accent of sex transpired, abstract voices aloof from any stress of passion, undistressed by any longing, even for God.  They were not human voices, and, hearing them, Evelyn had imagined angels bearing tall lilies in their hands, standing on wan heights of celestial landscape, singing their clear silver music.

These men had sung this “Agnus Dei” as perhaps it never would be sung again, but she knew the boy treble to be incapable of singing this canon properly, so she could hardly resist the impulse to run up to the choir loft and tell her father breathlessly that she would take his place.  She smiled at the consternation such an act would occasion.  Even if she could get to the choir loft without being noticed, she could not sing this music, her voice was full of sex, and this music required the strange sexless timbre of the voices she had heard in Rome.  But the boy sang better than she anticipated; his voice was wanting in strength and firmness; she listened, anxious to help him, perplexed that she could not.