r
unaware. She was tempted to confess the truth to Owen; the very words
she thought she should use rose up in her mind several times. "I told
you a lie. I don't know why I did, for there was absolutely no reason
why I should have said that I had not seen Ulick Dean." On Saturday the
annoyance which this lie had caused in her was as keen as ever: and it
was not until she had got into her carriage and was driving to Dulwich
that her consciousness of it died in the importance of her interview
with her father.

In comparing her present attitude of mind with that of last Thursday,
she was glad to notice that to-day she could not think that her father
would not forgive her. Her talk on the subject with Ulick had reassured
her. He would not have been so insistent if he had not been sure that
her father would forgive her in the end. But there would be
recriminations, and at the very thought of them she felt her courage
sink, and she asked herself why he should make her miserable if he was
going to forgive her in the end. Her plans were to talk to him about his
choir, and, if that did not succeed, to throw herself on her knees. She
remembered how she had thrown herself on her knees on the morning of the
afternoon she had gone away. And since then she had thrown herself at
his feet many times--every time she sang in the "Valkyrie." The scene in
which Wotan confides all his troubles and forebodings to Brunnhilde had
never been different from the long talks she and her father used to drop
into in the dim evenings in Dulwich. She had cheered him when he came
home depressed after a talk with the impossible Father Gordon, as she
had since cheered Wotan in his deep brooding over the doom of the gods
predicted by Wala, when the dusky foe of love should beget a son in
hate. Wotan had always been her father; Palestrina, Walhalla, and the
stupid Jesuits, what were they? She had often tried to work out the
allegory. It never came out quite right, but she always felt sure in
setting down Father Gordon as Alberich. The scene in the third act, when
she throws herself at Wotan's feet and begs his forgiveness (the music
and the words together surged upon her brain), was the scene that now
awaited her. She had at last come to this long-anticipated scene; and
the fictitious scene she had acted as she was now going to act the real
scene. True that Wotan forgave Brunnhilde after putting her to sleep on
the fire-surrounded rock, where she should rema