The next act is taken up with a Kermesse in the market-place of a country town.  Valentine, the brother of Margaret, departs for the wars, after confiding his sister to the care of his friend Siebel.  During a pause in the dances Faust salutes Margaret for the first time as she returns from church.  The third act takes place in Margaret’s garden.  Faust and Mephistopheles enter secretly, and deposit a casket of jewels upon the doorstep.  Margaret, woman-like, is won by their beauty, and cannot resist putting them on.  Faust finds her thus adorned, and wooes her passionately, while Mephistopheles undertakes to keep Dame Martha, her companion, out of the way.  The act ends by Margaret yielding to Faust’s prayers and entreaties.  In the fourth act Margaret is left disconsolate.  Faust has deserted her, and Valentine comes home to find his sister’s love-affair the scandal of the town.  He fights a duel with Faust, whom he finds lurking under his sister’s window, and dies cursing Margaret with his last breath.  During this act occurs the church scene, which is sometimes performed after Valentine’s death and sometimes before it.  Margaret is kneeling in the shadowy minster, striving to pray, but the voice of conscience stifles her half-formed utterances.  In Gounod’s libretto, the intangible reproaches which Margaret addresses to herself are materialised in the form of Mephistopheles, a proceeding which is both meaningless and inartistic, though perhaps dramatically unavoidable.  In the,’ last act, after a short scene on the Brocken and a conventional ballet, which are rarely performed in England, we are taken to the prison where Margaret lies condemned to death for the murder of her child.  Faust is introduced by the aid of Mephistopheles, and tries to persuade her to fly with him.  Weak and wandering though she is, she refuses, and dies to the chant of an angelic choir, while Faust is dragged down to the abyss by Mephistopheles.  Gounod’s music struggles nobly with the tawdriness and sentimentality of the libretto.  A good deal of the first and last acts is commonplace and conventional, but the other three contain beauties of a high order.  The life and gaiety of the Kermesse scene in the second act, the sonorous dignity of Valentine’s invocation of the cross, and the tender grace of Faust’s salutation—­the last a passage which might have been written by Mozart—­are too familiar to need more than a passing reference.  In the fourth act also there is much noble music.  Gounod may be forgiven even for the soldiers’ chorus, in consideration of the masculine vigour of the duel terzetto—­a purified reminiscence of Meyerbeer—­and the impressive church scene.  But the most characteristic part of the work is, after all, the love music in the third act.  The dreamy languor which pervades the scene, the cloying sweetness of the harmonies, the melting beauty of the orchestration, all combine to produce an effect; which was at that time entirely new to opera, and had no little share in forming the