Punch got down-stairs in time to find the crowd on the veranda in the act of dispersal to their rooms. He gave Judy’s message to his mother, and it had, of course, the effect of checking, for a few minutes, the movement indoors. People crowded around, plying him for details, and passing the news along. He was a little uneasy at first from the impression that he had seen a flicker of incredulity in his mother’s eye, but elsewhere belief seemed instantaneous. He avoided elaborating the story, though. He knew only what Judy had told him. He added one small lie of his own. He said he hadn’t seen the ankle himself. She’d been talking to him through the bathroom door. It was hard luck, they all felt, but there was nothing to be done about it. They might as well go in and dress for tennis or riding, or just lounging about. Punch was requisitioned as usher to show people where their rooms were. When he had personally conducted a good many of them and the rush was over, he came down-stairs from the third floor to find a man he hadn’t previously seen, standing about indecisively in the second-floor hall. “I seem to have got lost,” he said to the boy. “I’m William Grant, a cousin of Bruce Applebury. You’re Punch, aren’t you?” Punch said he was, and took the hand the man held out to him. “Why, you’re up in what we call The Club,” he said. “That’s on the next floor. I’ll show you.” “I don’t believe that’s necessary,” the man protested. “I think I can find it if you’ll tell me.” “Oh, no,” Punch insisted. “I’ll show you. Come along.” He was deeply perplexed as he turned to mount the stairs. There was nothing queer of course about his having failed to see the man in the crowd on the veranda. There was no reason to doubt his being a wedding guest. He looked like a person who would be one. Punch had liked his looks instantly. He looked sort of lazy, and yet alert too, and as if he was the kind of person that could understand things. But what he hadn’t in the least looked like, in the moment when Punch first glimpsed him in the hall, was a man who had lost his way and was looking for the door of his own room. It had looked more like waiting than looking. A rather exciting sort of waiting, too. Had he been a little reluctant to accept Punch’s guidance? Hadn’t he hung back a little, for one last glance around that hall that Gran’s door opened into? This must have been pure imagination on Punch’s part. There was no mystery about the man’s identity at all events. He was Bruce Applebury’s cousin, all right. The Club was what they called an irregular suite of three or four bedrooms and a bath, opening through a tiny vestibule of its own into the billiard room. As Punch opened the door and conducted the man in, they saw the prospective bridegroom, already stripped to his underclothes, and getting out of them for his bath.