No; the frightened girl was not pleased. Not at all! Neither the faint traffic hum nor the quiet chapel where they had first met impressed her, and it was all because he wasn’t there. Intellectually, she realized that Long Eamon, the nigh-quite foreboding, pagan, untamable only man she had ever really loved, had a full life in which he was marooned by his own crew on the Isle of Retribution, and he could not be expected to hold any consideration for the pleasure of one ultramarine, godless girl. Intellectually, she knew this. And yet…
   Truly, it had been a most burning day when the gypsy woman had brought him to her attention.
   It was then that an inrush of cool air as the door was flung open shattered her composure into a million undeniable pieces! She dropped the brimming wine glass heedlessly on the rug. Surely it could not be — but it was! At the door, the bloody and masculine face she had come to know so well! “I’ve thought of you every minute I’ve been away,” he intoned while the horror of these last months vanished in a blaze of joy. “I need you, my giddy little goose!”
   Only in this moment of extremity could it have happened that as the glow of renewed love gradually overcame her mounting desire for dinner, she knew that life without him was unthinkable, if not savage, seductive. Wthout him, could she ever have began to wonder how she would explain all this to Obadiah?