There was no real danger.
Beatrice liked him, no doubt; possibly she had even experienced a fit of tenderness towards him.

Such things come and such things go.

Time is a wonderful healer of moral distempers, and few young ladies endure the chains of an undesirable attachment for a period of seven whole months.
It made him almost blush to think that this might be so, and that the gratuitous extension of his misfortune to Beatrice might be nothing more than the working of his own unconscious vanity--a vanity which, did she know of it, would move her to angry laughter.
He remembered how once, when he was quite a young fellow, he had been somewhat smitten with a certain lady, who certainly, if he might judge from her words and acts, reciprocated the sentiment.

And he remembered also, how when he met that lady some months afterwards she treated him with a cold indifference, indeed almost with an insolence, that quite bewildered him, making him wonder how the same person could show in such different lights, till at length, mortified and ashamed by his mistake, he had gone away in a rage and seen her face no more.

Of course he had set it down to female infidelity; he had served her turn, she had made a fool of him, and that was all she wanted.