I turned over and drew up on my elbows and looked at him, at his quiet profile turned away from me.

"What would they do?"

"Nothing," he answered. "It's what they would think and feel that matters. And I have no time or place for it." He looked at me. "Be merciful and wise, Amadeo."

For a long time I said nothing. I merely looked at him. Only gradually did I realize I was frightened. For one moment it seemed that fear would obliterate the warmth of the moment, the soft glory of the radiant light swelling in the curtains, of the polished planes of his ivory face, the sweetness of his smile. Then some higher graver concern overruled the fear.

"You're not my slave at all, are you?" I whispered.

"Yes," he said, almost laughing again. "I am, if you must know."

"What happened, what did you do, what was it that-."

He laid his finger on my lips.

"Do you think me like other men?" he asked.

"No," I said, but the fear rose in the word and strangled out the wound. I tried to stop myself, but before I could I embraced him and tried to push my face into his neck. He was too hard for such things, though he cradled my head and kissed the top of it, though he gathered back my hair, and let his thumb sink into my cheek.

"Some day I want you to leave here," he said. "I want you to go. You'll take wealth with you and all the learning I've been able to give you. You'll take your grace with you, and all the many arts you've mastered, that you can paint, that you can play any music I ask of you- that you can do already-that you can so exquisitely dance. You'll take these accomplishments and you'll go out in search of those precious things that you want-."

"I want nothing but you."

"-and when you think back on this time, when in half-sleep at night you remember me as your eyes close on your pillow, these moments of ours will seem corrupt and most strange. They'll seem like sorcery and the antics of the mad, and this warm place might become the lost chamber of dark secrets and this might bring you pain."

"I won't go."

"Remember then that it was love," he said. "That this indeed was the school of love in which you healed your wounds, in which you learnt to speak again, aye, even to sing, and in which you were born out of the broken child as if he were no more than an eggshell, and you the angel, ascending out of him with widening, strengthening wings."

"And what if I never go of my own free will? Will you pitch me from some window so that I must fly or fall? Will you bolt all shutters after me? You had better, because I'll knock and knock and knock until I fall down dead. I'll have no wings that take me away from you."