as hard as a diamond. But is my heart as hard as
a diamond?" The thought awoke a little alarm, and she sat looking
into the receding landscape. "Even so I cannot help it." And she
wondered how it was that only one thing in the world seemed to
matter--to extricate the nuns from their difficulties, that was all.
Her poor people, of course she liked them; her voice, she liked it
too, without, however, being able to feel certain that it interested
her as much as it used to, or that she was not prepared to sacrifice
it if her purpose demanded the sacrifice. But there was no question
of such sacrifice: it was given to her as the means whereby she
might effect her purpose. If the Glasgow concert were as successful
as the Edinburgh, she would be able to bring back some hundreds of
pounds to the nuns, perhaps a thousand. And what a pleasure that
would be to her!

But the Glasgow concert was not nearly so successful: her manager
attributed the failure to a great strike which had just ended; there
was talk of another strike; moreover her week in Glasgow was a wet
one, and her manager said that people did not care to leave their
houses when it was raining.

"Or is it," she asked, "because the taste has moved from dramatic
singing to _il bel canto?_ In a few years nobody will want to hear
me, so I must make hay while the sun shines."

Her next concert succeeded hardly better than the Glasgow concert;
Hull, Leeds, Birmingham were tried, but only with moderate success,
and Evelyn returned to London with very little money for the
convent, and still less for her poor people.

"It is a disappointment to me, dear Mother?"

"My dear child, you've brought us a great deal of money, much more
than we expected."

"But, Mother, I thought I should be able to bring you three thousand
pounds, and pay off a great part of your mortgage."

"God, my child, seems to have thought differently."

The door opened.

"Now who is this? Ah! Sister Mary John."

"May I come in, dear Mother?"

"Certainly."

"You see, I was so anxious to see Miss Innes, to hear about the
concert tour--"

"Which wasn't a success at all, Sister Mary John. Oh, not at all a
success."

"Not a success?"

"Well, from an artistic point of view it was; I brought you some of
the notices," and Evelyn took out of her pocket some hundreds of
cuttings from newspapers. It had not occurred to her before, but now
the thought passed through her mind, formulating itself in this