Perhaps it was a matter of the way his back remained straight against the chair behind him, or the elegant way his hand rested on his ankle, and the other arm molded itself to the arm of the chair.

Only the thick wavy brown hair betrayed the dignity somewhat, tumbling down on his forehead so that finally he gave a little unconscious toss to his head.

But quite suddenly his composure melted; his face bore all the sudden lines of serious confusion, and then pure distress.

I couldn’t stand it. But I forced myself to be silent.

“I tried to hate you,” he confessed, the eyes widening even as the voice nearly died away. “I couldn’t do it; it’s as simple as that.” And for one moment there was the menace, the great preternatural anger, glaring out of him, before the face became perfectly miserable and then merely sad.

“Why not?”

“Don’t play with me.”

“I’ve never played with you! I mean these things when I say them. How can you not hate me?”

“I’d be making the same mistake you made if I hated you,” he said, eyebrows raised. “Don’t you see what you’ve done? You’ve given me the gift, but you spared me the capitulation. You’ve brought me over with all your skill and all your strength, but you didn’t require of me the moral defeat. You took the decision from me, and gave me what I could not help but want.”

I was speechless. It was all true, but it was the damnedest lie I’d ever heard. “Then rape and murder are our paths to glory! I don’t buy it. They are filthy. We are all damned and now you are too. And that’s what I’ve done to you.”

He bore that as if it were a series of soft slaps, merely flinching just a little and then fixing his eyes on me again.

“It took you two hundred years to learn that you wanted it,” he said. “I knew the moment I woke out of the stupor and saw you lying there on the floor. You looked like an empty shell to me. I knew you’d gone too far with it. I was in terror for you. And I was seeing you with these new eyes.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what went through my mind? I thought you’d found a way to die. You’d given me every drop of blood in you. And now you yourself were perishing before my very eyes. I knew I loved you. I knew I forgave you. And I knew with every breath I took and with every new color or shape I saw before me that I wanted what you’d given me—the new vision and life, which none of us can really describe! Oh, I couldn’t admit it. I had to curse you, fight you for a little while. But that’s all it was in the end—a little while.”

“You’re much smarter than I am,” I said softly.

“Well, of course, what did you expect?”