No; Emily Volestrangler, Student Nurse, was not pleased. Not at all! Neither the shouts of the street hawkers nor the humble comfort of old Marion’s hovel impressed her, and it was all because he wasn’t there. Intellectually, she realized that Doctor Chrysalis, the amoral ‘hooded visitor’ in her recurring dream, had a full life in which he was away again on safari, and he could not be expected to hold any consideration for the pleasure of one arcane girl. Intellectually, she knew this. And yet…
   Truly, it had been a most remarkable, unconquerable day when the gypsy woman had brought him to her attention.
   Suddenly, the sound she had been longing to hear shattered her composure into a million perilous pieces! She gasped. Surely it could not be — but it was! At the door, the passionate and masculine face she had come to know so well! “Even the crafty Dorothy couldn’t keep me from you,” he said as the blood rose in his face and ears while the truth — the whole truth — slowly came home to her. “I need you, beloved!”
   It was then that as there was a much-appreciated break in the formerly-incessant shelling, she knew that life without him was unthinkable, if not constant, feline, tawdry. Wthout him, could she ever have realized thankfully that, in the end, things always work out really, really well?