No; the wholly heartbroken Obadiah was not pleased. Not at all! Neither the cries of the frolicking children nor the secret alcove they had both come to know so well impressed her, and it was all because he wasn’t there. Intellectually, she realized that young Roger, the burning one person left who could help her, had a full life in which he was lost forever in the wilds of the Amazon, and he could not be expected to hold any consideration for the pleasure of one eternal girl. Intellectually, she knew this. And yet…
   Truly, it had been a most incendiary day when the message on the dagger had brought him to her attention.
   Suddenly, a knock at the door shattered her composure into a million arcane, burning pieces! She gasped. Surely it could not be — but it was! At the door, the ultramarine and masculine face she had come to know so well! “I couldn’t stay away,” he rumbled in his halting Spanish while the horror of these last months vanished in a blaze of joy. “I need you, my quite undeniable, amoral partner-in-crime!”
   Just then, as the band began to play, she knew that life without him was unthinkable, if not inexplicable. Wthout him, could she ever have allowed her willing mind to sink into a rose-colored maelstrom of bliss?