airy Maiden had promised Connla on the condition of his following her,
lie behind those specks of light?

But what end should she choose for herself if the choice were left to
her--to come back to Dulwich and live with her father? She might do
that--but when her father died? Then she hoped that she might die. But
she might outlive him for thirty years--Evelyn Innes, an old woman,
talking to the few friends who came to see her, of the days when Wagner
was triumphant, of her reading of "Isolde." Some such end as that would
be hers. Or she might end as Lady Asher. She might, but she did not
think she would. Owen seemed to think more of marriage now than he used
to. He had always said they would be married when she retired from the
stage. But why should she retire from the stage? If he had wanted to
marry her he should have asked her at first. She did not know what she
was going to do. No one knew what they were going to do. They simply
went on living. That moonlight was melting her brain away. She drew down
the blinds, and she fell asleep thinking of her father's choir and the
beautiful "Missa Brevis" which she was going to hear to-morrow.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

As they went to church, he told her about Monsignor Mostyn. Evelyn
remembered that the very day she went away, he had had an appointment
with the prelate, and while trying to recall the words he had used at
the time--how Monsignor believed that a revival of Palestrina would
advance the Catholic cause in England--she heard her father say that no
one except Monsignor could have succeeded in so difficult an enterprise
as the reformation of church music in England.

The organ is a Protestant instrument, and in organ music the London
churches do very well; the Protestant congregations are, musically, more
enlightened; the flattest degradation is found among the English
Catholics, and he instanced the Oratory as an extraordinary disgrace to
a civilised country, relating how he had heard the great Mass of Pope
Marcellus given there by an operatic choir of twenty singers. In the
West-end are apathy and fashionable vulgarity, and it was at St.
Joseph's, Southwark, that the Church had had restored to her all her own
beautiful music. Monsignor had begun by coming forward with a
subscription of one thousand pounds a year, and by such _largesse_ he
had confounded the intractable Jesuits and vanquished Father Gordon. The
poor man who had predicted ruin now viewed the mag