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"Of course not. I simply mean that you think things are possible which aren't possible! At least not for the rest of us. Like killing the wolves. . . "

A coldness passed over me when he said this. And for some reason I thought of that mysterious face again in the audience, the one watching. Something to do with the wolves. Something to do with the sentiments Nicki was expressing. Didn't make sense. I tried to shrug it off.

"If you'd set out to play the violin, you'd probably be playing for the Court by now," he said.

"Nicki, this kind of talk is poison," I said under my breath. "You can't do anything but try to get what you want. You knew the odds were against you when you started. There isn't anything else . . . except. . . "

"I know. " He smiled. "Except the meaninglessness. Death. "

"Yes," I said. "All you can do is make your life have meaning, make it good. "

"Oh, not goodness again," he said. "You and your malady of mortality, and your malady of goodness. " He had been looking at the fire and he turned to me with a deliberately scornful expression. "We're a pack of actors and entertainers who can't even be buried in consecrated ground. We're outcasts. "

"God, if you could only believe in it," I said, "that we do good when we make others forget their sorrow, make them forget for a little while that. . . "

"What? That they are going to die?" He smiled in a particularly vicious way. "Lestat, I thought all this would change with you when we got to Paris. "

"That was foolish of you, Nick," I answered. He was making me angry now. "I do good in the boulevard du Temple. I feel it -- "

I stopped because I saw the mysterious face again and a dark feeling had passed over me, something of foreboding. Yet even that startling face was usually smiling, that was the odd thing. Yes, smiling . . . enjoying . . .

"Lestat, I love you," Nicki said gravely. "I love you as I have loved few people in my life, but in a real way you're a fool with all your ideas about goodness. "

I laughed.

"Nicolas," I said, "I can live without God. I can even come to live with the idea there is no life after. But I do not think I could go on if I did not believe in the possibility of goodness. Instead of mocking me for once, why don't you tell me what you believe?"

"As I see it," he said, "there's weakness and there's strength. And there is good art and bad art. And that is what I believe in. At the moment we are engaged in making what is rather bad art and it has nothing to do with goodness!"

"Our conversation" could have fumed into a full-scale fight here if I had said all that was on my mind about bourgeois pomposity. For I fully believed that our work at Renaud's was in many ways finer than what I saw at the grand theaters. Only the framework was less impressive. Why couldn't a bourgeois gentleman forget about the frame? How could he be made to look at something other than the surface?

I took a deep breath.

"If goodness does exist," he said, "then I'm the opposite of it. I'm evil and I revel in it. I thumb my nose at goodness. And if you must know, I don't play the violin for the idiots who come to Renaud's to make them happy. I play it for me, for Nicolas. "

I didn't want to hear any more. It was time to go to bed. But I was bruised by this little talk and he knew it, and as I started to pull off my boots, he got up from the chair and came and sat next to me.

"I'm sorry," he said in the most broken voice. It was so changed from the posture of a minute ago that I looked up at him, and he was so young and so miserable that I couldn't help putting my arm around him and telling him that he must not worry about it anymore.

"You have a radiance in you, Lestat," he said. "And it draws everyone to you. It's there even when you're angry, or discouraged. "

"Poetry," I said. "We're both tired. "

"No, it's true," he said. "You have a light in you that's almost blinding. But in me there's only darkness. Sometimes I think it's like the darkness that infected you that night in the inn when you began to cry and to tremble. You were so helpless, so unprepared for it. I try to keep the darkness from you because I need your light. I need it desperately, but you don't need the darkness. "

"You're the mad one," I said. "If you could see yourself, hear your own voice, your music -- which of course you play for yourself -- you wouldn't see darkness, Nicki. You'd see an illumination that is all your own. Somber, yes, but light and beauty come together in you in a thousand different patterns. "

The next night the performance went especially well. The audience was a lively one, inspiring all of us to extra tricks. I did some new dance steps that for some reason never proved interesting in private rehearsal but worked miraculously on the stage. And Nicki was extraordinary with the violin, playing one of his own compositions.

But towards the end of the evening I glimpsed the mysterious face again. It jarred me worse than it ever had, and I almost lost the rhythm of my song. In fact it seemed my head for a moment was swimming.

When Nicki and I were alone I had to talk about it, about the peculiar sensation that I had fallen asleep on the stage and had been dreaming.

We sat by the hearth together with our wine on the top of a little barrel, and in the firelight Nicki looked as weary and dejected as he had the night before.

I didn't want to trouble him, but I couldn't forget about the face.

"Well, what does he look like?" Nicolas asked. He was warming his hands. And over his shoulder, I saw through the window a city of snow-covered rooftops that made me feel more cold. I didn't like this conversation.