"Yes. The other is that when Hunter is attacking you, as he will, without mercy and with every trick he knows, you'll remember that you, and your friends, desire you to live." "That I can promise. The other--" "Callista, look up at me." "Not yet. In a moment." "Tell me this: is there any virtue, any rational good, in declaring a literal truth when misinterpretation is inevitable, when you know to a certainty that your hearers cannot grasp the whole truth nor keep the partial truth in proportion, nor even guess at the background, the related truths?" "Virtue--rational good--I'm too confused, Cecil. Other thoughts. I don't know. I suppose not." "You call yourself guilty--of a momentary lapse that happened to end in disaster. But if you say that much, the jury will inevitably charge you with a different sort of guilt. They will say: she brooded and planned to murder her lover's wife, the old story--let her burn! But is it right, reasonable, is it anything but insane, that for such a lapse, when you were sick in mind and body, you should be strapped in a chair and the life burned out of you?" "You can frighten me, Cecil. It's strange. I don't think the brute fact has really frightened me before, not completely. It wasn't real." "It's real. I was trying to frighten you. You must not say on the stand what you've said to me tonight. I know it to be truth, because you've said it to me. Telling it to the jury will not serve truth, because their minds will make a lie of it. Look up at me now." "I'll promise it, I think--for a bargain. I'll lie by silence, in return for a promise from you." "A promise--what is it, Callista?" "Promise me that if I am acquitted, I may come to you, live with you--in marriage or not, it doesn't matter--love you and care for you so long as I can have you. Give me that, and then I will lie, I'll swear anything to save my life, I'll be such an actress--" "Callista, I'm sixty-eight, old and fat and ugly and tired." "Hush. Understand. It's you, you, you--the self in you, not old nor young nor anything but _you_. Promise me. My promise for yours. No other terms." "I promise it." "Now I can look up at you. Now I know that what Edith said is true: living is journeying, and love's a region we can enter for a while." "Yes, a region that changes if only because we do ourselves. Some try to prevent that, I suppose. They want it to be a closed room thick with perfume and curtains drawn against all weather, against night and day." "But when I come to you--you've promised it--I'll make it a region of summer, of morning and summer evening and every star at night." II COURT OF GENERAL SESSIONS OF WINCHESTER COUNTY, NEW ESSEX December 10, 1959 Action: _People vs. Callista Blake_; Justice Terence Mann presiding. Court in session at 0956.