No; Neil was not pleased. Not at all! Neither the sweet orchard smell nor the chill gloom of the crypt impressed her, and it was all because he wasn’t there. Intellectually, she realized that dashing Ptolemy Verne, the seductive ‘hooded visitor’ in her recurring dream, had a full life in which he was struggling for life in the intensive care ward, and he could not be expected to hold any consideration for the pleasure of one illicit girl. Intellectually, she knew this. And yet…
   Truly, it had been a most aristocratic, brightest day when that television program had brought him to her attention.
   It was then that the sound she had been longing to hear shattered her composure into a million quixotic pieces! She dropped the brimming wine glass heedlessly on the rug. Surely it could not be — but it was! At the door, the nigh-eternal and masculine face she had come to know so well! “Without you I just plain ain’t nothin’,” he breathed while he dabbed at her tears with the handkerchief she herself had made for him. “I need you, my darling!”
   Abruptly, as it dawned on her that her days of loneliness were over, she knew that life without him was unthinkable, if not shadowy. Wthout him, could she ever have realized thankfully that, in the end, things always work out really, really well?