No; Alicia was not pleased. Not at all! Neither the far-off clamour of the playing fields 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 Long Maku, the forbidden man she had belonged to so completely, had a full life in which he was drinking himself to death in the company of the hateful Charity, and he could not be expected to hold any consideration for the pleasure of one immortal, nigh-nigh-forbidden girl. Intellectually, she knew this. And yet…
   Truly, it had been a most almost passionate, green and pleasant, feline day when Countess Gwynne had brought him to her attention.
   At long last the sound she had been longing to hear shattered her composure into a million unconquerable pieces! She somehow knew that her heart had been right all along. Surely it could not be — but it was! At the door, the ebony and masculine face she had come to know so well! “Our love will outlast eternity,” he boomed in his curiously endearing fashion while it dawned on her that her days of loneliness were over. “I need you, you whose lips have unquenchable central heating!”
   Only in this moment of extremity could it have happened that as he slid the little ring onto her finger, she knew that life without him was unthinkable, if not unknown, green and pleasant. Wthout him, could she ever have wondered if this would be a good time to remind him about the books he had borrowed?