“‘What now?’ I asked her.
“‘To bind us together,’ she said. ‘Close, close together, and then the plunge! This time there shall be no failure. They shall not find one of us without the other. You are not afraid?’
“Afraid! My neck was bristling. The woman was proposing, as near as I could make out, that we go out in a boat, tie ourselves together, and jump overboard. She seemed to think it was an encore to some previous performance.
“‘Go slow,’ I said, thinking mighty hard. ‘I don’t quite see the point of this.’
“‘All, all is as it is foreordained in the stars; the curve of the astral courses, the illimitable, unchangeable curve that has made us what we are, and shall draw us on and on to our mighty destiny. You, you have pointed out the way.’
“That is what she gave me, waving her arms in the air.
“Didn’t I curse myself for not remembering what I had written her? No clue, except that the poor soul was plumb dippy—too dippy for me to marry at any price. It wouldn’t have held in the courts. Yet, there might have been five thousand dollars of diamonds on her. It was a tight place. I wanted to duck the whole thing; but the rings held me. I have always been dotty about diamonds. I suppose she felt me weakening. Women are queer, that way.
“‘You dare to break our pact?’ she says in a voice like a woman on the stage. Then she changed and spoke very gently. ‘You are looking at these gewgaws,’ she said, and took a diamond circlet from her finger. ‘What do these count for?’ And she put it in my hand. Another ring dropped at my feet. Mind, she was giving them to me. I do not know if it would hold in law, she being a lunatic; but I was going to take all I could, on the chance, and watch for a getaway. The diamonds had me hypnotized.
“‘These are as nothing compared to what we shall have,’ she went on, ‘after the plunge. Wait!’
“She had dropped the rope, and now she went into her paper parcel again, kneeling at my side. I had stooped to look for the fallen ring, when I felt her hand slide up my wrist, and then a quick little snap of something cold and close. A bracelet, I thought. And it was a bracelet!