Their eyes locked. His hand dropped. He sighed; so did she.

"All right. I'm sorry."

"You're going away!" she cried.

They sat in silence again, but their encounter had brought them so close, Caenis suddenly confessed with desperate clarity, "I am afraid of what I feel."

She should never have done it. She saw his face set. Men hated any admission of emotion. Men were terrified of the truth.

Not this one.

"So am I," he acknowledged. "But there seems nothing to gain by ignoring it." Fiddling with her sticks of sealing wax, he kept his tone deliberately level. "Are you still asking me to leave you alone?"

"I should," Caenis returned carefully, as she too found herself staring at the edge of the table. "You know I am not."

Though he wanted to disguise it, his gratitude was unmistakable. They both looked up again. Nothing had happened, yet everything had changed. They both smiled a little at their shared sense of helplessness.

Flavius Vespasianus was not a man anyone would expect to hold this kind of conversation. To Caenis he seemed too mature, too good-humored, too cynical to be touched by internal conflict or uncertainty. Yet he was stubbornly himself.

"Hmm! I'm going away," he agreed with a murmur of regret. "What a shame!"

After another pause he threw back his heavy head, his eyes on her all the time. "Oh, lass; I ought to leave you!"

"You must. I need to do my work."

"I don't want to." Yet he was already standing. They persuaded one another into sense; they always would.

Caenis had to finish correcting the copyists' work. She clambered to her feet and came around politely to take her visitor to the door. It was the first time she felt easy standing so near to him. Before he lifted the latch he turned back to her, smiling as he warned, "I'm going away—but I shall be coming back!"

Expecting him to make some more determined move, she was startled when he carefully clasped both her hands in his while he stood, looking at her; making her look at him; keeping her close. Any other man gazing at her so intently would have made some declaration. Not Vespasian. It was illegal and impossible; Caenis accepted that he never would.