When he had finished, she was still silent, and for so long a time that at last, with some impatience, he bent nearer to her, and exclaimed: "Well, Beatrice? What do you think of it all?"

She shuddered a little. There was still another interval before she spoke, and then, with calm directness, she replied: "I think you are both exceedingly brave to be willing to face the situation that exists."

"Eh?" he asked her, not comprehending.

"Why, if you carry out this compact that you have made, if Patricia Langdon becomes your wife according to the terms she has dictated to Melvin--for I can guess, now, what they are--you will both be casting yourselves straight down into hell. I speak metaphorically, of course," she added, with a whimsical smile. "I have been told that there isn't any hell, really. But I mean it, Roderick. If there isn't a hell, you two seem to be bent upon the arrangement of a correct imitation of one."

"How is that?" he demanded, frowning. "I don't know what you mean."

"Our friend has not been named 'Juno' for nothing. She is a strange girl; but I love her, almost as much as you do," Beatrice continued, as if she had not heard his question. "She possesses characteristics, the depth of which I have never been able to sound, and I am her best and closest friend. If you two live up to this agreement, in the spirit in which it was made, and conclude it in the spirit in which she has dictated her conditions to Melvin, I tremble for the consequences that will ensue, for I can almost foresee them. Patricia is not one who forgives easily, and she will resent a hurt to her pride with all the force there is in her."

Beatrice rose to her feet, standing before him, and he, also, stood up, facing her. She reached out both her hands toward him, and he took them; and there were tears in her big blue eyes, when she added, with a depth of feeling that he did not understand: "Roderick Duncan, it would be better for you, and for Patricia as well, if you never saw each other again. You might far better, and with much greater hope of happiness, cast your future lot with some other woman whom you have never thought of as a wife, than marry Patricia Langdon upon such terms as you have outlined. Have you known her so intimately all your life without understanding her at all? She might have forgiven disloyalty, or unfaithfulness, or at least have condoned such--but an offense against her pride? Never! You would be undergoing much less risk if you should select an utterly unknown woman from one of these boxes, and should take her out of this theatre now, and marry her instead!"




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