What he did not feel, he realized as he caught his breath again after the coughing jag, was afraid. Not of the Count and Countess, anyway. Their public faces and their private ones were… unexpectedly congruent. It seemed he could trust them, not so much not to hurt him, but to be what they were, what they appeared. He could not at first put a word to it, this sense of personal unity. Then it came to him. Oh. So that’s what integrity looks like. I didn’t know.