The flat was sweetly warm, and full of a popular but not overpowering incense—

something that made me think of Catholic churches of old, when the altar boy swung the silver censer at the end of his chain.

As I came into the living room, I saw the three of them very distinctly, ranged about the cheerfully lighted space, the even illumination making a mirror of the nightwalls beyond which the snow continued to descend upon New York. I wanted to see the snow. I walked past them and put my eye up against the glass. The whole roof of St.

Patrick's was white with fresh snow, the steep spires shaking off as much as they could, though every speck of ornament was decorated in white. The street was an impassable valley of white. Had they ceased to plow it?

People of New York moved below. Were these only the living? I stared with my right eye. I could see only what seemed to be the living.

I scanned the roof of the church in a near panic, suddenly, expecting to see a gargoyle wound into the artwork and discover that the gargoyle was alive and watching me.

But I had no feeling of anyone except those in the room, whom I loved, who were patiently waiting upon me and my melodramatic and self-indulgent silence.

I turned around. Armand had once again decked himself out in high-fashion velvet and embroidered lace, the kind of "romantic new look" one could find at any of the shops in the deep crevasse below us. His auburn hair was free and uncut and hung down in the way it used to do in ages long past, when as Satan's saint of the vampires of Paris, he would not have allowed himself the vanity to cut one lock of it. Only it was clean, shining clean, auburn in the light, and against the dark blood-red of his coat. And there were his sad and always youthful eyes looking at me, the smooth boyish cheeks, the angel's mouth. He sat at the table, reserved, filled with love and curiosity, and even a vague kind of humility which seemed to say: Put aside all our disputes. I am here for you.

"Yes," I said aloud. "Thank you."

David sat there, the robust brown-haired young Anglo-Indian, juicy and succulent to behold as he had been since the night I made him one of us. He wore his English tweed, with leather-patched elbows, and a vest as tightly buttoned as my own, and a cashmere scarf protecting his neck from the cold to which perhaps, for all his strength, he wasn't yet really accustomed.

It's strange how we feel cold. You can ignore it. And then very suddenly, you can take it personally.

My radiant Dora sat next, opposite Armand, and David sat facing me between them.

This left me the chair with its back to the glass and the sky if I wanted it. I stared at it.