where, from her own heart as well as
from outside her body. The immense hall rang to the glorious quality
of this sound as a violin-back vibrates to the drawn bow. It rained
down on her, it surged up to her, she could not believe that she
really heard it.

She looked quickly at her father. His arms were folded tightly across
his chest. He was looking frowningly at the back of the chair in front
of him. It was evident that Sylvia did not exist for him. She was
detached from her wonder at his pale sternness by the assault on her
nerves made by the first of those barbaric outcries of woe, that
sudden, brief clamor of grief, the shouts of despair, the beating upon
shields. Her heart stood still--There rose, singing like an archangel,
the mystic call of the Volsung, then the yearning melody of love; such
glory, such longing for beauty, for life--and then brusquely, again
and again, the screaming, sobbing recollection of the fact of
death....

When it was over, Sylvia's breath was still coming pantingly. "Oh,
Father! How--how wonderful--how--" she murmured.

He looked at her, as though he were angry with her, and yet scarcely
seeming to know her, and spoke in a hard, bitter tone: "And it is
_years_ since I have heard one!" He seemed to cry out upon her for the
conditions of his life.

She had no key for these words, could not imagine a meaning for them,
and, chilled and repelled, wondered if she had heard him rightly.

The funeral march from the Eroica began, and her father's face
softened. The swelling volume of tone rose like a flood-tide. The
great hall, the thousands of human hearts, all beat solemnly in the
grave and hopeless pulsations of the measured chords. The air
was thick with sorrow, with quiet despair. No outcries here, no
screams--the modern soul advancing somberly with a pale composure to
the grave of its love, aware that during all the centuries since the
dead Siegfried was lifted high on the shoulders of his warriors not a
word of explanation, of consolation has been found; that the modern,
barren self-control means only what the barbarian yells out in his
open abandonment to sorrow--and yet such beauty, such beauty in that
singing thread of melody--"_durch Leiden, Freude!_"

Not even the shadow of death had ever fallen across Sylvia's life, or
that of her father, to explain the premonitory emotion which now drew
them together like two frightened children. Sylvia felt the inexorable
music beating in h