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Meanwhile Beatrice and Benedick (who was masked) were having a brisk exchange of opinions.

“Did Benedick ever make you laugh?” asked she.

“Who is Benedick?” he inquired.

“A Prince’s jester,” replied Beatrice, and she spoke so sharply that “I would not marry her,” he declared afterwards, “if her estate were the Garden of Eden.”

But the principal speaker at the masquerade was neither Beatrice nor Benedick. It was Don Pedro, who carried out his plan to the letter, and brought the light back to Claudio’s face in a twinkling, by appearing before him with Leonato and Hero, and saying, “Claudio, when would you like to go to church?”

“To-morrow,” was the prompt answer. “Time goes on crutches till I marry Hero.”

“Give her a week, my dear son,” said Leonato, and Claudio’s heart thumped with joy.

“And now,” said the amiable Don Pedro, “we must find a wife for Signor Benedick. It is a task for Hercules.”

“I will help you,” said Leonato, “if I have to sit up ten nights.”

Then Hero spoke. “I will do what I can, my lord, to find a good husband for Beatrice.”

Thus, with happy laughter, ended the masquerade which had given Claudio a lesson for nothing.

Borachio cheered up Don John by laying a plan before him with which he was confident he could persuade both Claudio and Don Pedro that Hero was a fickle girl who had two strings to her bow. Don John agreed to this plan of hate.

Don Pedro, on the other hand, had devised a cunning plan of love. “If,” he said to Leonato, “we pretend, when Beatrice is near enough to overhear us, that Benedick is pining for her love, she will pity him, see his good qualities, and love him. And if, when Benedick thinks we don’t know he is listening, we say how sad it is that the beautiful Beatrice should be in love with a heartless scoffer like Benedick, he will certainly be on his knees before her in a week or less.”

So one day, when Benedick was reading in a summer-house, Claudio sat down outside it with Leonato, and said, “Your daughter told me something about a letter she wrote.”

“Letter!” exclaimed Leonato. “She will get up twenty times in the night and write goodness knows what. But once Hero peeped, and saw the words ‘Benedick and Beatrice’ on the sheet, and then Beatrice tore it up.”

“Hero told me,” said Claudio, “that she cried, ‘O sweet Benedick!'”

Benedick was touched to the core by this improbable story, which he was vain enough to believe. “She is fair and good,” he said to himself. “I must not seem proud. I feel that I love her. People will laugh, of course; but their paper bullets will do me no harm.”

At this moment Beatrice came to the summerhouse, and said, “Against my will, I have come to tell you that dinner is ready.”

“Fair Beatrice, I thank you,” said Benedick.

“I took no more pains to come than you take pains to thank me,” was the rejoinder, intended to freeze him.

But it did not freeze him. It warmed him. The meaning he squeezed out of her rude speech was that she was delighted to come to him.

Hero, who had undertaken the task of melting the heart of Beatrice, took no trouble to seek an occasion. She simply said to her maid Margaret one day, “Run into the parlor and whisper to Beatrice that Ursula and I are talking about her in the orchard.”

Having said this, she felt as sure that Beatrice would overhear what was meant for her ears as if she had made an appointment with her cousin.

In the orchard was a bower, screened from the sun by honeysuckles, and Beatrice entered it a few minutes after Margaret had gone on her errand.

“But are you sure,” asked Ursula, who was one of Hero’s attendants, “that Benedick loves Beatrice so devotedly?”

“So say the Prince and my betrothed,” replied Hero, “and they wished me to tell her, but I said, ‘No! Let Benedick get over it.'”