"Make it as near to the truth as you can, the better to make it a lie," Marius had taught.

Now I followed these words.

"Oh, but I thought I'd lost you," she said. "When you sent word, Marius, that he was recovering, I didn't at first believe you. I thought you meant to soften the inevitable truth."

How lovely she was, a perfect flower. Her blond hair was parted in the middle, and a thick lock on either side was wound with pearls and bound back with a clasp encrusted with them. The rest of her hair fell down a la Botticelli, in rivulets of shining yellow over her shoulders.

"You had cured him as completely as any human being could," Marius told her. "My task was to give him some old remedies of which only I know. And then to let the remedies do their work." He spoke simply, but to me he seemed sad.

A terrible sadness gripped me. I couldn't tell her what I was, or how different she seemed now, how richly opaque with human blood she seemed compared to us, and how her voice had taken on for me a new timbre that was purely human, and which gently nudged my senses if she but said one word.

"Well, you are both here, and you must both come often," she said. "Don't ever let such a separation occur again. Marius, I would have come to you, but Riccardo told me you wanted peace and quiet. I would have nursed Amadeo in any state."

"I know you would have, my darling," Marius said. "But as I said, it was solitude he needed, and your beauty is an intoxicant, and your words a stimulus more intense perhaps than you realize." It had no tone of flattery but sounded like a sincere confession.

She shook her head a little sadly. "I've discovered that Venice is not my home unless you're here." She looked cautiously towards the front parlor, and then she lapsed into a low voice. "Marius, you freed me from those who had a hold on me."

"That was simple enough," he said. "It was a pleasure, in fact. How rank those men were, cousins of yours, if I'm not mistaken, and eager to use you and your great reputation for beauty in their twisted financial affairs."

She blushed, and I lifted my hand to beg him to go easy with what he said. I knew now that during the slaughter of the Florentine banquet chamber, he had read from the victims' minds all kinds of things which were unknown to me.

"Cousins? Perhaps," she said. "I have conveniently forgotten that. That they were a terror to those whom they lured into expensive loans and dangerous opportunities, that I can say without a doubt. Marius, the strangest things have happened, things upon which I never counted."

I loved the look of seriousness on her delicate features. She seemed too beautiful to have a brain.

"I find myself richer," she said, "as I can keep the larger portion of my own income, and others-this is the strange part-others, in gratitude that our banker and our extortionist is gone, have lavished on me countless gifts of gold and jewels, yes, even this necklace, look, and you know these are all sea pearls and matched in size, and this is a veritable rope of them, see, and all this is given me, though I have averred a hundred times that I never had the deed done."