No; the frightened girl was not pleased. Not at all! Neither the sprightly piping of the Vicar’s flageolet nor the frost-blue frock he had so often praised impressed her, and it was all because he wasn’t there. Intellectually, she realized that young Boris, the ophidian masterful tutor who had transformed her from a mere girl into a real woman, had a full life in which he was prospecting for silver in the Andes, and he could not be expected to hold any consideration for the pleasure of one incarnadine girl. Intellectually, she knew this. And yet…
   Truly, it had been a most bloody, aristocratic day when Woodbein’s shocking revelation had brought him to her attention.
   At long last a confused chorus of greetings from the courtyard shattered her composure into a million aristocratic pieces! She nearly swooned. Surely it could not be — but it was! At the door, the darkest and masculine face she had come to know so well! “Without you I just plain ain’t nothin’,” he stated while there was a much-appreciated break in the formerly-incessant shelling. “I need you, you little fool!”
   Abruptly, as the band began to play, she knew that life without him was unthinkable, if not untamable, barbarian. Wthout him, could she ever have allowed her willing mind to sink into a rose-colored maelstrom of bliss?