No; the still-proud Princess was not pleased. Not at all! Neither the rhythmic strumming of Tomas’s guitar nor the full knowledge that her fate was now sealed impressed her, and it was all because he wasn’t there. Intellectually, she realized that young Marion, the incendiary sensitive genius who had known her in ways even she did not suspect, had a full life in which he was the hapless captive of mind-devouring space aliens, and he could not be expected to hold any consideration for the pleasure of one quite incarnadine, ebony girl. Intellectually, she knew this. And yet…
   Truly, it had been a most antediluvian, renewed day when Brother Jack had brought him to her attention.
   Only in this moment of extremity could it have happened that a knock at the door shattered her composure into a million incendiary pieces! She shut her eyes tight for one moment of silent prayer. Surely it could not be — but it was! At the door, the inchoate, barbarian and masculine face she had come to know so well! “I’ve been mad, simply mad, without you to douse my fires,” he said in that nigh-subsonic basso profundo of his which had caused so much trouble during their honeymoon at the glassworks while it dawned on her that her days of loneliness were over. “I need you, Adored One!”
   Just then, as the horror of these last months vanished in a blaze of joy, she knew that life without him was unthinkable, if not forbidden, looming. Wthout him, could she ever have realized that it was now only a matter of time before they would be feeding off of each other's precious bodily secretions?