Not for a moment through the song did he take his eyes off her; he looked at her with an intensity of gaze that seemed to be reading the emotion with which the lovely melody filled her.

For herself, she looked straight out over the hall, with grey eyes half-closed, and mouth that in the pauses of her song was large and full-lipped, generously curving, and face that seemed lit with the light of the morning she sang of.

She was the song; Michael thought of her as just that, and the pianist who watched and understood her so unerringly was the song, too.

They had for him no identity of their own; they were as remote from everyday life as the mind of Schumann which they made so vivid.

It was then that they existed.
The last song of the group she sang in English, for it was "Who is Sylvia ?" There was a buzz of smiles and whispers among the front row in the pause before it, and regaining her own identity for a moment, she smiled at a group of her friends among whom clearly it was a cliche species of joke that she should ask who Sylvia was, and enumerate her merits, when all the time she was Sylvia.