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 her own veins, and when she took her father’s hand it seemed to her that its strong pulses throbbed to the same rhythm; beauty, and despair ... hope ... life ... death.

At the end, “Oh, Father—­oh, Father!” she said under her breath, imploringly, struggling to free herself from the muffling, enveloping sense of imminent disaster.  He pressed her hand hard and smiled at her.  It was his own old smile, the father-look which had been her heart’s home all her life—­but it was infinitely sweeter to her now than ever before.  She had never felt closer to him.  There was a pause during which they did not speak, and then there burst upon them the splendid tumult of “Death and Transfiguration,” which, like a great wind, swept Sylvia out of herself.  She could not follow the music—­she had never heard of it before.  She was beaten down, overwhelmed, freed, as though the transfiguration were her own, from the pitiful barriers of consciousness....