She was most interested when he spoke of the College of Adepts and the Rosicrucians. Life as he spoke seemed to become intense and exalted, and the invisible seemed on the point of becoming visible when he told her how the brotherhood greeted each other with, "Man is God, and son of God, and there is no God but man." He repeated all he could remember of their terrible oath. The College of Adepts, she learned, was the antithesis of the monastery. The monastery is passive spirituality, the College of Adepts is active spirituality; the monastery abases itself before God, the Adepts seek to become as gods. "There is a spiritual stream," he said, "that flows behind the circumstance of history, and they claim that all religions are but vulgarisations of their doctrine. The Adept, by conquering passion and ignorance, attains a mastery over change, and so prolongs his life beyond any human limit." She begged Ulick not to forget to bring the book of magic which contained the oath of the Rosicrucians. It was now after eight, and they returned home, watching the white mists creeping up the blue fields. The sky was lucent as a crystal, and the purple would not die out of the west until nearly midnight. Evelyn would have liked to have stayed with him in the twilight, for as the landscape darkened, his strange figure grew symbolic, and his words, whether by beauty of verbal expression or the manner with which they were spoken, seemed to bring the unseen world nearer. The outside world seemed to slip back, to become subordinate as earth becomes subordinate to the sky when the stars come. Evelyn felt the life of the flesh in which Owen had placed her fall from her; it became dissipated; her life rose to the head, and looking into the mists she seemed to discover the life that haunts in the dark. It seemed to whisper and beckon her. Her father was in the music-room when they returned, and at sight of him she forgot Ulick and his enchantments. "Father, dear, I am so proud of you." Standing by him, her hand on his shoulder, she said, "Your choir is wonderful, dear. Palestrina has been heard in London at last!" She told him that she had heard the Mass in Rome, but had been disappointed in the papal choir, and she explained why she preferred his reading to that of the Roman musician. But he would not be consoled, and when he mentioned that the altos were out of tune, Ulick looked at Evelyn. "Father, dear, Ulick and I have had an argument about the altos. He says they were wrong in the Kyrie. Were they?" "Of course they were, but the piano has spoilt your ear. What was I saying last night?" He took down a violin to test his daughter's ear, and the results of the examination were humiliating to her. According to Mr. Innes, Bach was the last composer who had distinguished between A sharp and B flat. The very principle of Wagner's music is the identification of the two notes.