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 shine. They were shaped of that light, themselves, and they took their old places in the theatre they must have dearly loved, since they built it upon the most magnificent site in the world. You'd have thought then that only a great chant should have come up to us from the stage; that anything less wouldn't have been bearable. No, it wasn't so. The music was transfigured, translated out of itself into something almost intolerably beautiful. And then, when they played the Pastorale, there came a sweet, carolling voice from the air—a woman's voice singing as a nightingale sings, not singing to be heard, but just out of its own heart—and sang the Pastorale with them. You couldn't tell where she sat or stood, or in what part of the theatre she was; and you didn't want to know: she was doing simply the loveliest thing a human being ever did, and you had no wish to see her or even to learn who she was. What she did, itself, was enough. For me"

"Yes? For you, Charles?" his sister asked, as he paused.

"For me," he answered, "it was the final loveliness in the hour of greatest sheer beauty I've ever known in my life. One doesn't want to touch such a thing at all."