. Inspired by
the scene, Ulick began to hum the old English air, "Summer is a-coming
in," and without raising her eyes from the chestnut blooms that fell
incessantly on the pavement, Evelyn said--"That monk had a beautiful
dream."

And for a while they thought of that monk at Reading composing for his
innocent recreation that beautiful piece of music; they hummed it
together, thinking of his quiet monastery, and it seemed to them that it
would be a beautiful thing if life were over, if it might pass away, as
that monk's life had passed, in peace, in aspiration whether of prayer
or of art. Thinking of the music she had heard over night, that she had
hummed through and that her father had played on the harpsichord, she
said--"And you, too, had a beautiful dream when you wrote 'Connla and
the Fairy Maiden'?"

"Ah, your father showed it to you; you hadn't told me."

Then, absorbed in his idea, never speaking for effect, stripping himself
of every adventitious pleasure in the service of his idea, he told her
of the change that had come upon his aestheticism in the last year. He
had been organist for three years at St. Patrick's, and since then had
been interested in the modes, the abandoned modes in which the plain
chant is written. These modes were the beginning of music, the original
source; in them were written, no doubt, the songs and dances of the folk
who died two, three, four, five thousand years ago, but none of this
music had been preserved, only the religious chants of this distant
period of art have come down to us, and from this accident his sprung
the belief that the early modes are only capable of expressing religious
emotion. But the gayest rhythms can be written in these modes as easily
as in the ordinary major and minor scales. It was thought, too, that the
modes did not lend themselves to modulation, but by long study of them
Ulick had discovered how they may be submitted to the science of
modulation.

"I see," Evelyn replied pensively. "The first line written in one of the
ancient modes, and underneath the melody, chromatic harmonies."

"No, that would be horrible," Ulick cried, like a dog whose tail has
been trodden upon. "That is the infamous modern practice. I seek the
harmony in the sentiment of the melody I am writing, in the tonality of
the mode I am writing."

And then, little by little, they entered the perilous question of the
ancient modes. There were several, and three were as distinctive