Sylph Etherege (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales")

A secluded garden becomes the stage for a quiet, unsettling game of influence. Two hidden figures watch a delicate young woman, Sylvia, as she gazes at a tiny, wrapped object in a window seat, their whispered incantations hinting at a charm meant to sway her fate. The younger observer, Edward Hamilton, boasts a keen intellect and a mischievous smile, while his companion frets over the moral weight of their meddling.

Sylvia, an orphan raised under the rigid care of a bachelor uncle, has spent her life drifting in imagination, nurturing a tender, almost reverent attachment to her distant cousin Edgar Vaughan—whom she envisions as an ethereal lover. Now under the guardianship of the fashionable Mrs. Grosvenor, she must confront the expectations of an arranged marriage and the fragile world she has built for herself. As the first act unfolds, listeners are drawn into a richly textured portrait of longing, secrecy, and the subtle power of unseen forces.