At the close of the second act, Standish renewed his pleadings for a marriage that night, and in her bitter mood, Geraldine, like many others who exchange one pain for another in mad impatience, ceased to struggle against his importunities and yielded a passive consent to his ardent prayer. CHAPTER XVII. AT THE END OF THE PLAY. "A love like ours was a challenge to fate; She rang down the curtain and shifted the scene; Yet sometimes now, when the day grows late, I can hear you calling for Little Queen. For a happy home and a busy life Can never wholly crowd out our past; In the twilight pauses that come from strife You will think of me while life shall last." Yes, she had promised to marry Clifford Standish as soon as the last act of the play was over. The act would leave the heroine, Laurel, presumably "happy ever after" but must plunge poor Geraldine into deeper despair. For though she admired Clifford Standish greatly, was proud of his love, and grateful for his kindness, she did not feel as if she could ever love him as she had loved another. Her poor heart seemed dead and cold in its numb misery of slighted love, and the thought of marriage was repugnant to every instinct of her nature. But she owed Clifford Standish such a debt of gratitude that there seemed no way of paying it save by yielding to his importunate entreaties for an immediate marriage. But how she shrank from the moment that would seal her fate, although she had failed in courage to defend herself from it. It was a bitter pride that was pushing her into this unloving marriage. She would let Harry Hawthorne, who had flirted with her so cruelly, see that she did not care for him at all; that she could marry a man who was his superior in position, in riches, and in everything that made up true and noble manhood. Geraldine despised a male flirt. Whenever one of the creatures tried to catch her eyes in public, she always set him down beneath contempt, and one withering glance from her flashing eyes would make him shrink into himself, ashamed for once before the scornful eyes of a true woman. And the thought that Harry Hawthorne was one of those contemptible wretches was inexpressibly bitter. She had shed many secret tears over the dread that he had read in her frank brown eyes the tenderness he had awakened in her heart. She thought when she was married to the actor, and Hawthorne heard of it, he would think she had only been flirting with him at Newburgh, and that she had been engaged to Standish all the while. In this fancy there was a kind of balm for her aching heart. She could hardly keep the tears back from her eyes as she thought it over and over, wondering if, after all, Harry Hawthorne had not cared for her a wee bit, but had been bound to Daisy Odell beforehand. She wondered if she should ever meet him again, after she was married, and if it would give him pain to know if she belonged to another man.