It was now after eight, and they returned home, watching the white mists creeping up the blue fields.  The sky was lucent as a crystal, and the purple would not die out of the west until nearly midnight.  Evelyn would have liked to have stayed with him in the twilight, for as the landscape darkened, his strange figure grew symbolic, and his words, whether by beauty of verbal expression or the manner with which they were spoken, seemed to bring the unseen world nearer.  The outside world seemed to slip back, to become subordinate as earth becomes subordinate to the sky when the stars come.  Evelyn felt the life of the flesh in which Owen had placed her fall from her; it became dissipated; her life rose to the head, and looking into the mists she seemed to discover the life that haunts in the dark.  It seemed to whisper and beckon her.

Her father was in the music-room when they returned, and at sight of him she forgot Ulick and his enchantments.

“Father, dear, I am so proud of you.”  Standing by him, her hand on his shoulder, she said, “Your choir is wonderful, dear.  Palestrina has been heard in London at last!”

She told him that she had heard the Mass in Rome, but had been disappointed in the papal choir, and she explained why she preferred his reading to that of the Roman musician.  But he would not be consoled, and when he mentioned that the altos were out of tune, Ulick looked at Evelyn.

“Father, dear, Ulick and I have had an argument about the altos.  He says they were wrong in the Kyrie.  Were they?”

“Of course they were, but the piano has spoilt your ear.  What was I saying last night?”

He took down a violin to test his daughter’s ear, and the results of the examination were humiliating to her.

According to Mr. Innes, Bach was the last composer who had distinguished between A sharp and B flat.  The very principle of Wagner’s music is the identification of the two notes.

She ran out of the room, saying that she must change her dress, and Mr. Innes looked at Ulick interrogatively.  He seemed a little confused, and hoped he had not hurt her feelings, and Ulick assured him that to-morrow she would tell the incident in the theatre, that she would be the first to see the humour of it.  The news that she was staying at Dowlands, and the presumption that she would sing at the concert, had brought many a priest from St. Joseph’s, and all the painters, men of letters, and designers of stained glass, and all the old pupils, the viol players, and the madrigal singers, and when Evelyn came downstairs in her pink frock, she was surrounded by her old friends.

“Do come, girls; can you come on Thursday night?  I’ll send you seats.  It would be such a pleasure to me to sing to you, but not to-night; to-night I want to be like old times.  I am going to play the viola da gamba.”

“But you used to sing Elizabethan songs in old times.”