“Well, there was only one answer to that. I said I was. She opened her package and took out a coil of rope. It was this gray-white rope, sort of clothes-line, and it looked strong. “‘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! “‘Forever! Together!’ she said, and stood up beside me, chained to me by the handcuffs she had slipped on my right wrist and her left. Never you think your nerve is sound till you have felt something like that. I thought mine was—and I squalled aloud like a child at a ghost. “‘Hush!’ she said, and her free arm pressed across my mouth. “‘How much to let me off?’ I asked as soon as I could get breath. You see, it flashed on me that it was a trap. You can never tell, in our line, when the detectives may be after you, or what kind of a game they’ll put up. I looked around for the rest of the bunch to come and jump me, but I didn’t see a thing. Her next words put me on.