rds grew distinct.

"Pieta, signore, di me dolente," it sang.

Silvia leaned out of the window and looked down at the singer. His face
was lifted to the white moonlight, and seemed in its pallid beauty a
concentration of the moonlight. Only his face was visible, for the
shadow of the tree hid all his figure. One might almost have expected to
catch a glimmer of two motionless wings bearing up that face, so fair it
was.

To Silvia it was as if another self, who grieved also, but who could
speak, were uttering all her pain, and lightening it so. She recognized
Claudio's voice. He was the chief singer in the cathedral, and sang like
an angel. She was afraid that Claudio had done very wrong in not being a
priest, but, for all that, she had often found her devotion increased by
his singing. The Christmas night would not have been half so joyful
lacking his _Adeste Fideles_; the _Stabat Mater_ sung by him in Holy
Week made her tears of religious sorrow burst forth afresh; and when on
Easter morning he sang the _Gloria_ it had seemed to her that the
heavens were opening.

For all that, however, he had been to her not a person, but a voice.
That he should come here and express her sorrow made him seem different.
For the first time she looked at his face. By daylight it was thin and
finely featured, and of a clear darkness like shaded water, through
which the faintest tinge of color is visible. In this transfigurating
moonlight it became of a luminous whiteness.

The song ended, the singer turned his head slightly and looked up at
Silvia's window. She did not draw back. There was no recognition of any
human sympathy with him, and no slightest consciousness of that airy and
silent friendship which had long been weaving itself over the tops of
the mountains that separated them. How could she know that Claudio had
sung for her, and that it had been the measure of his success to see her
head droop or lift as he sang of sorrow and pain or of joy and triumph?
The choir had their post over the door; and, besides, she never glanced
up even in going out. Therefore she gazed down into his uplifted face
with a sweet and sorrowful tranquillity, her soul pure and candid to its
uttermost depths.

For Claudio, who had sung to express his sympathy for her, but had not
dreamed of seeing her, it was as if the dark-blue sky above had opened
and an angel had looked out when he saw her face. He could only stretch
his clasped hands toward her.