“Never can one find a piece of music when one wants it:  I don’t know if you have noticed that nothing is so difficult to find as a piece of music.  Day after day it is under your hands, it would seem as if there was not another piece in the organ loft, but the moment you want it, it has disappeared.  I don’t know how it is.”

“What are you looking for?  Perhaps I can help you.”

“Well, I was thinking that you might like”—­Sister Mary John looked up at Evelyn—­“I suppose you can sing B flat, or even C?”

“Yes, I can sing C;” and Evelyn thought of the last page of the “Dusk of the Gods.”  “But what are you looking for?”

Sister Mary John did not answer.  She threw the music from side to side, every minute growing more impatient.  “It is most strange,” she said at last, looking up at Evelyn.  Evelyn smiled.  With all her brusque, self-willed ways, Sister Mary John was clearly a lady born and an intelligent woman.

“I’m afraid I shall not be able to find you anything that you’d care to sing.”

“Oh, yes, I shall,” Evelyn replied encouragingly.

“It is all such poor stuff.  We’ve no singers here.  Do you know, I’ve never heard a great singer, and I’ve often wished to.  The only thing I regret is not having heard a little music before I came here.  But I’ve heard of Wagner; you sing Wagner, don’t you, Miss Innes?”

“Yes, I sing little else.  ’Fidelio’—­”

“Ah, I know some of the music.  Do you sing—­”

Sister Mary John hummed a few bars.

“Yes, I sing that.”

“Well, I shall hear you sing to-day.  I’ve been wishing to go to St. Joseph’s to hear Palestrina.  You were brought up on music.  You can sing at sight—­in the key that it is written in?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“But all prima-donnas can do that?”

“No; on the contrary, I think I’m the only one.  Singers on the operatic stage learn their parts at the piano.”

She could see that to Sister Mary John music was the temptation of her life, and she imagined that her confession must be a little musical record.  She had lost her temper with Sister So-and-So because she could not, etc.  But time was getting on.  If she was to sing that afternoon, she must find something, and seeing that Sister Mary John lingered over some sheets of music, as if she thought that it presented some possibility, Evelyn asked her what it was.  It was a Mass by Mozart for four voices, which Sister Mary John had arranged for a single voice.

“The choir and I sing the melody in unison, and I play the entire Mass on the organ.”

Evelyn smiled, and seeing that the smile distressed the nun, she was sorry.