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"You don't understand. I'm speaking of the character of human beings, not what they believe in. I'm speaking of those who won't accept a useless lie, just because they were born to it. I mean those who would be something better. They work, they sacrifice, they do things. . . "

He was moved by this, and I was a little surprised that I'd said it. Yet I felt I had hurt him somehow.

"There is blessedness in that," I said. "There's sanctity. And God or no God, there is goodness in it. I know this the way I know the mountains are out there, that the stars shine. "

He looked sad for me. And he looked hurt still. But for the moment I didn't think of him.

I was thinking of the conversation I had had with my mother and my perception that I couldn't be good and defy my family. But if I believed what I was saying . . .

As if he could read my mind, he asked:

"But do you really believe those things?"

"Maybe yes. Maybe no," I said. I couldn't bear to see him look so sad.

And I think more on account of that than anything else I told him the whole story of how I'd run off with the players. I told him what I'd never told anyone, not even my mother, about those few days and the happiness they'd given me.

"Now, how could it not have been good," I asked, "to give and receive such happiness? We brought to life that town when we put on our play. Magic, I tell you. It could heal the sick, it could. "

He shook his head. And I knew there were things he wanted to say which out of respect for me he was leaving to silence.

"You don't understand, do you?" I asked.

"Lestat, sin always feels good," he said gravely. "Don't you see that? Why do you think the Church has always condemned the players? It was from Dionysus, the wine god, that the theater came. You can read that in Aristotle. And Dionysus was a god that drove men to debauchery. It felt good to you to be on that stage because it was abandoned and lewd -- the age-old service of the god of the grape -- and you were having a high time of it defying your father -- '

"No, Nicki. No, a thousand times no. "

"Lestat, we're partners in sin," he said, smiling finally.

"We've always been. We've both behaved badly, both been utterly disreputable. It's what binds us together. "

Now it was my turn to look sad and hurt. And the Golden Moment was gone beyond reprieve -- unless something new was to happen.

"Come on," I said suddenly. "Get your violin, and we'll go off somewhere in the woods where the music won't wake up anybody. We'll see if there isn't some goodness in it. "

"You're a madman!" he said. But he grabbed the unopened bottle by the neck and headed for the door immediately.

I was right behind him.

When he came out of his house with the violin, he said:

"Let's go to the witches' place! Look, it's a half moon. Plenty of light. We'll do the devil's dance and play for the spirits of the witches. "

I laughed. I had to be drunk to go along with that. "We'll reconsecrate the spot," I insisted, "with good and pure music. "

It had been years and years since I'd walked in the witches' place.

The moon was bright enough, as he'd said, to see the charred stakes in their grim circle and the ground in which nothing ever grew even one hundred years after the burnings. The new saplings of the forest kept their distance. And so the wind struck the clearing, and above, clinging to the rocky slope, the village hovered in darkness.

A faint chill passed over me, but it was the mere shadow of the anguish I'd felt as a child when I'd heard those awful words "roasted alive," when I had imagined the suffering.

Nicki's white lace shoes shone in the pale light, and he struck up a gypsy song at once and danced round in a circle as he played it.

I sat on a broad burned stump of tree and drank from the bottle. And the heartbreaking feeling came as it always did with the music. What sin was there, I thought, except to live out my life in this awful place? And pretty soon I was silently and unobtrusively crying.

Though it seemed the music had never stopped, Nicki was comforting me. We sat side by side and he told me that the world was full of inequities and that we were prisoners, he and I, of this awful corner of France, and someday we would break out of it. And I thought of my mother in the castle high up the mountain, and the sadness numbed me until I couldn't bear it, and Nicki started playing again, telling me to dance and to forget everything.

Yes, that's what it could make you do, I wanted to say. Is that sin? How can it be evil? I went after him as he danced in a circle. The notes seemed to be flying up and out of the violin as if they were made of gold. I could almost see them flashing. I danced round and round him now and he sawed away into a deeper and more frenzied music. I spread the wings of the fur lined cape and threw back my head to look at the moon. The music rose all around me like smoke, and the witches' place was no more. There was only the sky above arching down to the mountains.