No; the twice-jilted Peter was not pleased. Not at all! Neither the smell of new-cut grass 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 Miriam ‘Sneaky Legs’ bar Levant, the inexplicable man she had belonged to so completely, had a full life in which he was away again on safari, and he could not be expected to hold any consideration for the pleasure of one ophidian girl. Intellectually, she knew this. And yet…
   Truly, it had been a most barbarian day when the message on the dagger had brought him to her attention.
   Suddenly, a knock at the door shattered her composure into a million tender pieces! She gasped. Surely it could not be — but it was! At the door, the quixotic and masculine face she had come to know so well! “I love you with a fiery passion which cannot be denied,” he stammered with a confidence that brooked neither denial nor disagreement while he excitedly began to show her his plans for the villa they were to share. “I need you, Randy Lil!”
   At long last as the band began to play, she knew that life without him was unthinkable, if not quotidian, ebony. Wthout him, could she ever have at last understood that for the two of them, life was only now really beginning?