“Yes? How sad.” She got up to put the dishes in the sink. She was still laughing to herself. “I think you allow yourself only the crusts of your experiences,” she said, “only the shadows. You always leave the good part.”

The lute breathed like a creature waking slowly as he picked it up. “This is the good part,” he said. He began to play a Narvaez pavane that he was vastly proud of having transcribed for the lute. The translucent chords fell slowly, shivering and sliding away through his fingers. Ben came in while he was playing, and they nodded at each other, but Farrell went on with the pavane until it ended abruptly in a gentle broken arpeggio. Then he put the lute down, and he got up and hugged Ben.

“Spanish baroque,” he said. “I’ve been playing a lot of it, the last year or so.” Ben put his hands on Farrell’s shoulders and shook him slowly but hard. Farrell said, “You look different.”

“You don’t look any different at all,” Ben said. “Except the eyes.” Sia sat watching them, one hand closed in Briseis’ fur.

“That’s funny,” Farrell said softly. “Your eyes haven’t changed.” He stared, wary and fascinated and truly alarmed. The Ben Kassoy with whom he had waited for buses in the New York morning snow had looked very much like a dolphin and moved as sweetly and frivolously as any dolphin through the acrid waters of the high-school pool. On land he had tripped over things, tall and slouching, nearsighted, stranded in this stingy, unkind element. But he carried himself with Sia’s fierce containment now, and the glassy skin had weathered to the hard opacity of sailcloth, the round, blinking face—dolphin-browed, dolphin-beaky, dolphin-naked of shadows—grown as rough and solitary and rich with darknesses as a Crusader castle. Farrell had been casually prepared, after seven years, for a cleared-up complexion and the first gray hairs; but he would have passed this face in the street, turning a block later to look after it in wonder and disbelief. Then Ben knuckled his mouth with his left forefinger in the old study-hall habit, and Farrell said automatically, “Don’t do that. Your mother hates that.”