her, wanting to comfort her, and then, as she ground her forehead desperately into my neck, hugging me tight around the chest, I couldn't not touch her, couldn't not embrace her, couldn't not assure her.
"Armand, I love you, I adore you, Armand, I live only for you, and now with you always," she said.
I nodded, I tried to speak. She kissed my tears. She began to kiss them rapidly and desperately. "Stop it, stop crying, don't cry," she kept saying in her urgent low whisper. "Armand, we love you."
"Armand, we are so happy!" cried Benji. "Look, Armand, look! We can dance together now to her music. We can do everything together. Armand, we have hunted already." He dashed up to me and bent his knees, poised to spring with excitement as if to emphasize his point. Then he sighed and flung out his arms to me again, "Ah, poor Armand, you are all wrong, all filled with wrong dreams. Armand, don't you see?"
"I love you," I whispered in a tiny voice into Sybelle's ear. I whispered it again, and then my resistance broke completely, and I crushed her gently to me and with rampant fingers felt her silky white skin and the zinging fineness of her shining hair.
Still holding her to me, I whispered, "Don't tremble, I love you, I love you."
I clasped Benji to me with my left hand. "And you, scamp, you can tell me all of it in time. Just let me hold you now. Let me hold you."
I was shivering. I was the one shivering. They enclosed me again with all their tenderness, seeking to keep me warm.
Finally, patting them both, taking my leave of them with kisses, I shrank away and fell down exhausted into a large old velvet chair.
My head throbbed and I felt my tears coming again, but with all my force I swallowed my tears for their sake. I had no choice.
Sybelle had gone back to the piano, and striking the keys she began the Sonata again. This time she sang out the notes in a beautiful low monosyllabic soprano, and Benji began dancing again, whirling, and prancing, and stomping with his bare feet, in lovely keeping with Sybelle's time.
I sat forward with my head in my hands. I wanted my hair to come down and hide me from all eyes, but for all its thickness it was only a head of hair.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and I stiffened, but I could not say a word, lest I'd start crying again and cursing with all my might. I was silent.
"I don't expect you to understand," he said under his breath.
I sat up. He was beside me, seated on the arm of the chair. He looked down at me.
I made my face pleasant, all smiles even, and my voice so velvet and placid that no one could have thought I was talking to him of anything but love.
"How could you do it? Why did you do it? Do you hate me so much? Don't lie to me. Don't tell me stupid things that you know I will never, never believe. Don't lie to me for Pandora's sake or their sake. I'll care for them and love them forever. But don't lie. You did it for vengeance, didn't you, Master, you did it for hate?"
"How could I?" he asked in the same voice, expressive of pure love, and it seemed the very genuine voice of love talking to me from his sincere and pleading face. "If ever I did anything for love, I have done this for it. I did it for love and for you. I did it for all the wrongs done you, and the loneliness you've suffered, and the horrors that the world put upon you when you were too young and too untried to know how to fight them and then too vanquished to wage a battle with a full heart. I did it for you."
"Oh, you lie, you lie in your heart," I said, "if not with your tongue. You did it for spite, and you have just revealed it all too plainly to me. You did it for spite because I wasn't the fledgling you wanted to make of me. I wasn't the clever rebel who could stand up to Santino and his band of monsters, and I was the one, after all those centuries, that disappointed you yet again and horribly because I went into the sun after I saw the Veil. That's why