Into this silence, like a bird murmuring a drowsy note over a still
pool, there floated the beginning of _Am Meer_. Sylvia sat, passive
to her finger-tips, a vase filled to the brim with melody. She stared
with unseeing eyes at the back of the man at the piano. She was not
thinking of him, she was not aware that she was conscious of him at
all; but hours afterward wherever she looked, she saw for an instant
again in miniature the slender, vigorous, swaying figure; the thick
brown hair, streaked with white and curling slightly at the ends; the
brooding head....

When the last note was still, the man stood up and moved away from the
piano. He dropped into an arm-chair near Sylvia, and leaning his
fine, ugly head back against the brilliant chintz, he looked at her
meditatively. His great bodily suavity gave his every action a curious
significance and grace. Sylvia, still under the spell of his singing,
did not stir, returning his look out of wide, dreaming eyes.

When he spoke, his voice blended with the silence almost as
harmoniously as the music.... "Do you know what I wish you would
do, Miss Sylvia Marshall? I wish you would tell me something about
yourself. Now that I'm no longer forbidden to look at you, or think
about you...."

"Forbidden?" asked Sylvia, very much astonished.

"There!" he said, wilfully mistaking her meaning, and smiling faintly,
"I am such an old gentleman that I'm perfectly negligible to a young
lady. She doesn't even notice or not whether I look at her, and think
about her."