It sounded so genuine that a little colour struggled into Aunt Julia’s face as she bent to replace in the music-stand the old leather-bound songbook that had her initials on the cover.  Freddy Malins, who had listened with his head perched sideways to hear her better, was still applauding when everyone else had ceased and talking animatedly to his mother who nodded her head gravely and slowly in acquiescence.  At last, when he could clap no more, he stood up suddenly and hurried across the room to Aunt Julia whose hand he seized and held in both his hands, shaking it when words failed him or the catch in his voice proved too much for him.

“I was just telling my mother,” he said, “I never heard you sing so well, never.  No, I never heard your voice so good as it is tonight.  Now!  Would you believe that now?  That’s the truth.  Upon my word and honour that’s the truth.  I never heard your voice sound so fresh and so... so clear and fresh, never.”

Aunt Julia smiled broadly and murmured something about compliments as she released her hand from his grasp.  Mr. Browne extended his open hand towards her and said to those who were near him in the manner of a showman introducing a prodigy to an audience: 

“Miss Julia Morkan, my latest discovery!”

He was laughing very heartily at this himself when Freddy Malins turned to him and said: 

“Well, Browne, if you’re serious you might make a worse discovery.  All I can say is I never heard her sing half so well as long as I am coming here.  And that’s the honest truth.”

“Neither did I,” said Mr. Browne.  “I think her voice has greatly improved.”

Aunt Julia shrugged her shoulders and said with meek pride: 

“Thirty years ago I hadn’t a bad voice as voices go.”

“I often told Julia,” said Aunt Kate emphatically, “that she was simply thrown away in that choir.  But she never would be said by me.”

She turned as if to appeal to the good sense of the others against a refractory child while Aunt Julia gazed in front of her, a vague smile of reminiscence playing on her face.

“No,” continued Aunt Kate, “she wouldn’t be said or led by anyone, slaving there in that choir night and day, night and day.  Six o’clock on Christmas morning!  And all for what?”

“Well, isn’t it for the honour of God, Aunt Kate?” asked Mary Jane, twisting round on the piano-stool and smiling.

Aunt Kate turned fiercely on her niece and said: 

“I know all about the honour of God, Mary Jane, but I think it’s not at all honourable for the pope to turn out the women out of the choirs that have slaved there all their lives and put little whipper-snappers of boys over their heads.  I suppose it is for the good of the Church if the pope does it.  But it’s not just, Mary Jane, and it’s not right.”

She had worked herself into a passion and would have continued in defence of her sister for it was a sore subject with her but Mary Jane, seeing that all the dancers had come back, intervened pacifically: