“Three and a half inches.”

“Uh-huh. What do you do when you want to—”

“Now cut that out!” Tony sat upright, rigid with chivalrous indignation.

“Kiss her, I was about to say. I suppose you can always find a rock or a low table…. Oh, hell, I’m sorry. Forget I said that. Belfort…Any relation to Dr. Belfort of the Math Department at Granstock?”

“Uh—yes. His daughter.”

“When are you being married? No, don’t tell me. June, of course.”

“That’s right. I don’t know why you—”

“Neither do I,” I admitted. “I’m very happy for you, Tony. I honestly am. But I don’t understand why you are here instead of in Illinois.”

“She knows all about you,” Tony said.

“All about me?”

“All she needs to know.” Tony bowed his head. A lock of raven hair dropped adorably over one eyebrow. I repressed an urge to grab it and pull as hard as I could. “It was okay,” he went on gloomily, “until about a month ago, when I woke her up calling your name.”

“Did you really, you dear thing?”

“It wasn’t so much what I said as the way I said it. ‘Oh, Vicky—Vicky—oooooh…’”

He sounded like a dying calf, or a man in the last extremity of about-to-be fulfilled passion. I grinned reluctantly. “I can see her point—though I still think this is stupid. She sent you back to your old love to make sure the incubus is exorcised?”

“Succubus,” Tony said. “Incubi were masculine; the female demons whose diabolical sexual assaults on helpless innocent men—”

“Oh, right. Seems to me you’re waffling, Tony. Either you’re still lusting for me or you’re not. What’s the point of the Bayrischer Hof?”

“I don’t really have a reservation.”

“I thought not. It’s a very expensive hotel.”

“I had assumed I’d stay with you, of course. In a perfectly platonic way—no fooling around—”

My sympathy for cute little Ann began to dissipate. “‘I could not love thee, dear, so much, Lov’d I not honour more.’” But this was really too far out. Not love, quoth she, but vanity, sets love a task like…Like a weekend nose to nose and side by side with an old flame, with no moment of weakness, no—“fooling around,” indeed.

“And you agreed?” I demanded incredulously.

“I didn’t think there’d be any problem.” Tony looked so hurt and baffled and young that I thought seriously of slugging him square in the chops. That boyish look gets all his women, but he was thirty-four years old, for God’s sake. Old enough to have better sense.

“I mean, we were always good friends,” Tony went on in an aggrieved voice. “I used to like to talk to you. If you hadn’t kissed me—”

“I did it out of the kindness of my heart, you conceited male chauvinist! If you’re going to let one friendly kiss get your male hormones in a whirl…Did this woman step out of some kind of time warp, or is she just emotionally retarded?”

“Of course a single experiment is not conclusive,” said Tony, reaching for me.