ughed. "What makes you so civilized?"

She clasped her hands between her knees and cast her eyes upward as if
in deep thought. "Ah, well, our churches are huge and magnificent."

"So are our mosques."

"Our paintings and mosaics and statues of saints and angels and emperors
are the most beautiful in the world."

"Idols," he interrupted, but he turned to her and smiled as she had.
"The Prophet ordered idols destroyed."

"And therefore the art of painting languishes among you," she said,
poking her forefinger into his shoulder. "Someday I will show you my
paintings if you promise not to destroy them."

His shoulder tingled where she had touched him. She must have been
carried away by her feelings about the arts of her homeland to make such
a gesture. Surely it could not have been deliberate. His hand rested
between them on the edge of the fountain. He moved a bit closer to her
so that the edge of his hand nearly touched her thigh.

He nodded. "I will teach you the art of calligraphy as my Sufi master
practiced it, and save your soul."

_I would really like to do that. Ah, but I cannot teach her to write
Arabic. What if someone were to see her practice work?_

He sighed inwardly.

"Hm," she grunted. "I doubt that _you_ can save _my_ soul. But as for
writing, we are familiar with dramatists like Sophocles, philosophers
like Aristotle. We read Latin poets like Ovid, whose book I just gave to
Rachel. Here in his native Italy his work is thought licentious."

"I have read Aristotle and Plato in Arabic," he said. "And I have no
doubt our Persian poets sing as gloriously as your Greeks and Latins.
And for licentious tales, those told in our bazaars would turn your
cheeks bright red."

Those cheeks were a smooth cream color, he observed. He looked about
him. There was no one but himself and Sophia in the atrium. A
multistoried gallery lined with columns and arches ran around all four
sides of the central courtyard. There might be servants, spies for the
cardinal, watching them, but he could see no one on any of the levels.

_To the devil with them all._

For weeks he had been wanting to reach out and touch that unveiled
beauty, that ivory skin. Now he did it. Very lightly his fingers
traveled from her cheekbone to her jaw.

She reached up and took his hand--not to remove it, as he had
momentarily thought she might, but to hold it briefly against her cheek,
then let it go.

They sat silently looking at each oth