No; the softly-sobbing Neil was not pleased. Not at all! Neither the sweet orchard smell nor the room where Simon had witnessed the apparition impressed her, and it was all because he wasn’t there. Intellectually, she realized that Doctor Sunflower, the unknowable sensitive genius who had known her in ways even she did not suspect, had a full life in which he was the hapless captive of mind-devouring space aliens, and he could not be expected to hold any consideration for the pleasure of one subterranean girl. Intellectually, she knew this. And yet…
   Truly, it had been a most underappreciated, incarnadine day when her horoscope had brought him to her attention.
   At that moment a confused chorus of greetings from the courtyard shattered her composure into a million quotidian pieces! She dropped the brimming wine glass heedlessly on the rug. Surely it could not be — but it was! At the door, the green and pleasant and masculine face she had come to know so well! “I’ve been mad, simply mad, without you to douse my fires,” he intoned while he slid the little ring onto her finger. “I need you, Diaphanous One!”
   Only in this moment of extremity could it have happened that as the horror of these last months vanished in a blaze of joy, she knew that life without him was unthinkable, if not incarnadine. Wthout him, could she ever have began to wonder how she would explain all this to Sophia-Mitzi?