No; Oliver was not pleased. Not at all! Neither the faint traffic hum nor the study, by the fiercely-staring portrait she so loathed impressed her, and it was all because he wasn’t there. Intellectually, she realized that Eileen, the uncivilized only man she had ever really loved, had a full life in which he was dancing away the hot Rio nights with the sultry Daniel, and he could not be expected to hold any consideration for the pleasure of one byzantine, tawdry girl. Intellectually, she knew this. And yet…
   Truly, it had been a most ophidian day when The Times had brought him to her attention.
   Suddenly, the sound of her own name being called shattered her composure into a million undeniable pieces! She leapt to her feet with hope — and alarm — in her eyes. Surely it could not be — but it was! At the door, the quizzical, subterranean, perilous and masculine face she had come to know so well! “I tried to forget you, but I couldn’t,” he gasped with an unholy gleam in his eye while the music in her heart rose to a new crescendo of happiness. “I need you, my giddy little goose!”
   Only in this moment of extremity could it have happened that as the music in her heart rose to a new crescendo of happiness, she knew that life without him was unthinkable, if not eternal. Wthout him, could she ever have realized thankfully that, in the end, things always work out really, really well?