Michael that the singer was like him, though she was fair and he dark.  But his perception of either of them visually was but vague; he had come to hear and not to see.  Neither she nor Hermann had any music with them, and Hermann just glanced at the programme, which he put down on the top of the piano, which, again unusually, was open.  Then without pause they began the set of German songs—­Brahms, Schubert, Schumann—­with which the recital opened.  And for one moment, before he lost himself in the ecstasy of hearing, Michael found himself registering the fact that Sylvia Falbe had one of the most charming faces he had ever seen.  The next he was swallowed up in melody.

She had the ease of the consummate artist, and each note, like the gates of the New Jerusalem, was a pearl, round and smooth and luminous almost, so that it was as if many-coloured light came from her lips.  Nor was that all; it seemed as if the accompaniment was made by the song itself, coming into life with the freshness of the dawn of its creation; it was impossible to believe that one mind directed the singer and another the pianist, and if the voice was an example of art in excelsis, not less exalted was the perfection of the player.  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.  Michael felt rather impatient at this; she was not anybody just now but a singer.  And then came the divine inevitable simplicity of perfect words and the melody preordained for them.  The singer, as he knew, was German, but she had no trace of foreign accent.  It seemed to him that this was just one miracle the more; she had become English because she was singing what Shakespeare wrote.