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." A few years before this Sylvia would have burst out impetuously, "Oh yes, I have! I've wondered awfully what made you so indifferent," but now she kept this reflection to herself and merely said, "What in the world did you fancy was 'forbidding' you?" "Honor!" said Morrison, with a note of mock solemnity. "_Honor!_ Victoria was so evidently snatching at you as a last hope for Arnold. She gave me to understand that everybody else but Arnold was to be strictly non-existent. But now that Arnold has found a character beautifully and archaically simple to match his own primitive needs, I don't see why I shouldn't enjoy a little civilized talk with you. In any case, it was absurd to think of _you_ for Arnold. It merely shows how driven poor Victoria was!"