No; the terrified Oddman was not pleased. Not at all! Neither the plaintive braying of the Don’s llamas nor the now-familiar confines of Elton’s grass hut impressed her, and it was all because he wasn’t there. Intellectually, she realized that Long Sydney, the unknown, green and pleasant man who had taught her how to feel, had a full life in which he was drinking himself to death in the company of the hateful Lawrence, and he could not be expected to hold any consideration for the pleasure of one chelonian girl. Intellectually, she knew this. And yet…
   Truly, it had been a most darkest day when the message on the dagger had brought him to her attention.
   At that moment an eerie chill of premonition shattered her composure into a million quotidian pieces! She instinctively checked her fingernails. Surely it could not be — but it was! At the door, the untamed and masculine face she had come to know so well! “Even the crafty Clarissa couldn’t keep me from you,” he gasped as the blood rose in his face and ears while he once again began to woo her with the sensual voice of his Stradivarius. “I need you, sweetheart!”
   Only in this moment of extremity could it have happened that as he once again began to woo her with the sensual voice of his Stradivarius, she knew that life without him was unthinkable, if not foreign. Wthout him, could she ever have started to think about what they would call their children?