Above the virginal on which Mr. Innes was playing there hung a portrait of a woman, and, happening to look up, a sudden memory came upon him, and he began to play an aria out of Don Giovanni.  But he stopped before many bars, and holding the candle end high, so that he could see the face, continued the melody with his right hand.  To see her lips and to strike the notes was almost like hearing her sing it again.  Her voice came to him through many years, from the first evening he had heard her sing at La Scala.  Then he was a young man spending a holiday in Italy, and she had made his fortune for the time by singing one of his songs.  They were married in Italy, and at the end of some months they had gone to Paris and to Brussels, where Mrs. Innes had engagements to fulfil.  It was in Brussels that she had lost her voice.  For a long while it was believed that she might recover it, but these hopes proved illusory, and, in trying to regain what she had lost irrevocably, the money she had earned dwindled to a last few hundred pounds.  The Innes had returned to London, and, with a baby-daughter, settled in Dulwich.  Mr. Innes accepted the post of organist at St. Joseph’s, the parish church in Southwark, and Mrs. Innes had begun her singing classes.

Her reputation as a singer favoured her, and an aptitude for teaching enabled her to maintain, for many years, a distinguished position in the musical world.  Mr. Innes’s abilities contributed to their success, and he might have become a famous London organist if he had devoted himself to the instrument.  But one day seeing in a book the words “viola d’amore,” he fancied he would like to possess an instrument with such a name.  The instrument demanded the music that had been written for it.  Byrd’s beautiful vocal Mass had led him to Palestrina and Vittoria, and these wakened in him dreams of a sufficient choir at St. Joseph’s for a revival of their works.

So when Evelyn clambered on her father’s knee, it was to learn the chants that he hummed from old manuscripts and missals, and it was the contrapuntal fancies of the Elizabethan composers that he gave her to play on the virginal, or the preludes of Bach on the clavichord.  Her infantile graces at these instruments were the delight and amazement of her parents.  She warbled this old-time music as other children do the vulgar songs of the hour; she seemed less anxious to learn the operatic music which she heard in her mother’s class-rooms, and there was a shade of uneasiness in Mrs. Innes’s admiration of the beauty of Evelyn’s taste; but Mr. Innes said that it was better that her first love should be for the best, and he could not help hoping that it would not be with the airs of Lucia and Traviata that she would become famous.  As if in answer, the child began to hum the celebrated waltz, a moment after a beautiful Ave Maria, composed by a Fleming at the end of the fifteenth century, a quick, sobbing rhythm, expressive of naive petulance at delay in the Virgin’s intercession.  Mr. Innes called it natural music—­music which the modern Church abhorred and shamefully ostracised; and the conversation turned on the incurably bad taste and the musical misdeeds of a certain priest, Father Gordon, whom Mr. Innes judged to be responsible for all the bad music to be heard at St. Joseph’s.