O it is the shape, the shape of my mate!
Oh moon, do not keep me from her any longer."

From there, without interruption it swept along to the end.

It was during the ecstatic pianissimo just before the final section
that their hands clasped. Which of them first sought the contact
neither of them knew but they sat linked like that, tingling,
breathless during the lines:--

"... somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me,
So faint I must be still, be still to listen,
But not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately to
me."

On the last "Hither, my love! Here I am! Here!" the clasp tightened,
convulsively. But it was not until the circuit was broken that the spark
really leaped across the gap.

There was no applause in the other room when the song ended for the
second time, but it won a clear half minute of breathless silence before
the eddies of talk began again. During that tight-stretched moment the
pair upon the settee, their hands just unclasped, sat motionless, fully
aware of each other for the first time, almost unendurably aware,
thrilling with the just-arrived sense of the amazing intimacy of the
experience they had shared. Neither of them was innocent but neither had
ever known so complete a fusion of his identity with another as this
which the spell of his music had produced.

They sat side by side but not very close, not so close that there was