“No,” replied Manuel, “he is writing many letters to Rome.  Will you come and play to me?”

“Willingly!” and Angela went lightly up the winding steps of the gallery, “But you have been out all day,—­are you not tired?”

“No, not now.  I was weary,—­very weary of seeing and hearing so many false things . . .”

“False things?” echoed Angela thoughtfully, as she seated herself at the organ, “What were they?”

“Churches principally,” said Manuel quietly; “How sad it is that people should come into those grand buildings looking for Christ and never finding Him!”

“But they are all built for the worship of Christ,” said Angela, pressing her small white fingers on the organ keys, and drawing out one or two deep and solemn sounds by way of prelude, “Why should you think He is not in them?”

“He cannot be,” answered Manuel, “They are all unlike Him!  Remember how poor he was!—­He told His followers to despise all riches and worldly praise!—­and now see how the very preachers try to obtain notice and reward for declaring His simple word!  The churches seem quite empty of Him,—­and how empty too must be the hearts and souls of all the poor people who go to such places to be comforted!”

Angela did not reply,—­her hands had unconsciously wandered into the mazes of a rich Beethoven voluntary, and the notes, firm, grand, and harmonious, rolled out in the silence with a warm deep tenderness that thrilled the air as with a rhythmic beat of angels’ wings.  Lost in thought, she scarcely knew what she played, nor how she was playing,—­but she was conscious of a sudden and singular exaltation of spirit,—­a rush of inward energy that was almost protest,—­a force which refused to be checked, and which seemed to fill her to the very finger tips with ardours not her own,—­martyrs going to the destroying flames might have felt as she felt then.  There was a grave sense of impending sorrow hanging over her, mingled with a strong and prayerful resolve to overcome whatever threatened her soul’s peace,—­and she played on and on, listening to the rushing waves of sound which she herself evoked, and almost losing herself in a trance of thought and vision.  And in this dreamy, supersensitive condition, she imagined that even Manuel’s face fair and innocent as it was, grew still more beautiful,—­a light, not of the sun’s making, seemed to dwell like an aureole in his clustering hair and in his earnest eyes,—­and a smile sweeter than any she had ever seen, seemed to tremble on his lips as she looked at him.

“You are thinking beautiful things,” he said gently, “And they are all in the music.  Shall I tell you about them?”

She nodded assent, while her fingers, softly pressing out the last chord of Beethoven’s music, wandered of their own will into the melancholy pathos of a Schubert “Reverie.”