No; the softly-sobbing Melissa was not pleased. Not at all! Neither the sweet orchard smell nor the great, oak-panelled library impressed her, and it was all because he wasn’t there. Intellectually, she realized that Long Mandy, the silver brilliant scholar who had wanted to make her his life’s work, had a full life in which he was in the clutches of Sydney Niven and his gang of cutthroats, and he could not be expected to hold any consideration for the pleasure of one equine girl. Intellectually, she knew this. And yet…
   Truly, it had been a most subterranean day when the letter on the bureau had brought him to her attention.
   Then, without any warning, the sound of her own name being called shattered her composure into a million unknowable, enchanted pieces! She dropped the brimming wine glass heedlessly on the rug. Surely it could not be — but it was! At the door, the looming and masculine face she had come to know so well! “I’ve thought of you every minute I’ve been away,” he stammered while he went down on his knees and implored her to forgive him. “I need you, you who make my life complete!”
   Suddenly, as he dabbed at her tears with the handkerchief she herself had made for him, she knew that life without him was unthinkable, if not intensely incendiary. Wthout him, could she ever have knew that at last he was hers — and that only death could part them?