er old friends.

"Do come, girls; can you come on Thursday night? I'll send you seats. It
would be such a pleasure to me to sing to you, but not to-night;
to-night I want to be like old times. I am going to play the viola da
gamba."

"But you used to sing Elizabethan songs in old times."

"Yes, but father thinks I have lost my ear; I shall not sing to-night."

Ulick laughed outright; the others looked at Evelyn amazed and a little
perplexed, and the consumptive man who wore brown clothes and who had
asked her to marry him came forward to congratulate her. But while
talking to him, her eyes were attracted by the tall, spare ecclesiastic
who stood talking to her father. She thought vaguely of Ulick's
depreciation. In spite of herself she felt herself gravitating towards
him. Several times she nearly broke off the conversation with the
consumptive man: her feet seemed to acquire a will of their own. But
when her eyes and thought returned to the consumptive man, her heart
filled with plaintive terror, for she could not help thinking of the
little space he had to live, and how soon the earth would be over him.
She met in his eyes a clear, plaintive look, in which she seemed to
catch sight of his pathetic soul. She seemed to be aware of it, almost
in contact with it, and through the eyes she divined the thought passing
there, and it was painful to her to think that it was of her health and
success he was thinking. She could see how cruelly she reminded him of
his folly in asking her to marry him, and she was quite sure that he was
thinking now how very lucky for her it was that she had refused him.
Pictures were formulating, she could see, in his poor mind of how
different her life would have been in the home he had to offer her, and
all this seemed to her so infinitely pathetic that she forgot Ulick,
Monsignor and everything else. Her father called her.

"Evelyn," he said, "let me introduce you to Monsignor."

The sight of a priest always shocked her; the austere face and the
reserved manner, the hard yet kind eyes, that appearance of
frequentation of the other world, at least of the hither side of this,
impressed her, and she trembled before him as she had trembled six years
ago when she met Owen in the same room. And when the concert was over,
when she lay in bed, she wondered. She asked herself how it was that a
little ordinary conversation about church singing--Palestrina, plain
chant, the papal choir, and the res