The orchestra, an army of ants, straggled out on the stage. Sylvia was astonished at their numbers--sixteen first violins, she saw by the program! She commented to her father on the difficulty of keeping them all in tune. He smiled at her absently, bade her, with an air of suppressed excitement, wait until she had heard them, and fell to biting his nails nervously. She re-read the program and all the advertisements, hypnotized, like every one else in the audience, by the sight of printed matter. She noticed that the first number of this memorial concert was the funeral march from the Götterdämmerung, which she knew very well from having heard a good many times a rather thin version of it for four strings and a piano. The conductor, a solitary ant, made his toilsome way across the great front of the stage, evoking a burst of applause, which resounded hollowly in the inhuman spaces of the building. He mounted a step, waved his antennae, there was a great indrawn breath of silence, and then Sylvia, waiting with agreeable curiosity to hear how a big orchestra would really sound, gasped and held her breath. The cup of that vast building suddenly brimmed with a magical flood of pure tone, coming from everywhere, from nowhere, 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.