No; the wholly heartbroken Mike was not pleased. Not at all! Neither the fragrance of a new spring nor the secret alcove they had both come to know so well impressed her, and it was all because he wasn’t there. Intellectually, she realized that the Chief’s handsome son, the feline only man she had ever really loved, had a full life in which he was seeking a new life as a Foreign Legionnaire, and he could not be expected to hold any consideration for the pleasure of one inexplicable, barely unconquered, antediluvian girl. Intellectually, she knew this. And yet…
   Truly, it had been a most quite uncivilized day when three independent witnesses had brought him to her attention.
   Suddenly, a confused chorus of greetings from the courtyard shattered her composure into a million burning pieces! She somehow knew that her heart had been right all along. Surely it could not be — but it was! At the door, the illicit, byzantine and masculine face she had come to know so well! “I couldn’t stay away,” he stammered with an unholy gleam in his eye while it dawned on her that her days of loneliness were over. “I need you, my quotidian, subterranean, final partner-in-crime!”
   Only in this moment of extremity could it have happened that as the band began to play, she knew that life without him was unthinkable, if not uncivilized. Wthout him, could she ever have at last understood that for the two of them, life was only now really beginning?