He seemed to be coming around all right by himself, so I let him alone. There was a ruminative silence between us for a while. “That’s a nice little niece of mine,” he said at last. “Hard to realize she’s getting married, though. I wish I knew her better.” “What do you think of her young man?” I asked. “Oh, a perfectly sound fellow, I think,” he said, without enthusiasm. “No mistaking his type. He’s what he is, plain as a flagstaff. Great on discipline and exercise. Plays a very good game of bridge and takes it as seriously as he does the Constitution of the United States. He’ll have a thick neck by the time he’s forty, and be one of the pillars of an intensely respectable club. Seems like rather a sledge-hammer, though, for little Judy.” “Is that at all the way she feels, do you think?” I asked. He was properly non-committal about that. “Oh, don’t ask me,” he said. “The etiquette is so different from what it was in my day. Then a young couple like that would have played up--held hands, slunk off by themselves whenever they got a chance. I’ve hardly seen these two together since he got here. That’s the modern manner, I suppose.” I’d been thinking over what Punch had told me of the arrival of the guests. There had been nothing unnatural about Judy’s greeting of her fiancé or of the others who came down from the station in the same car with him. Punch had spoken of hearing her laugh two or three times after he’d taken his sentry post on the davenport up-stairs. Whatever had happened to her had happened after that. “Is there anybody in the crowd that came down on the special car,” I asked, “anybody who arrived at The Oaks later than Bruce did, who has--well, attracted your attention in any way? Anybody who seemed to have any special effect on Judy?” For the third time he turned upon me that intense stare of his. “No,” he said, “I can’t say there is. I don’t know why you asked me that, but I’ll tell you this. I happened to be looking at her--it’s the natural thing to do--and I saw her face change. I couldn’t say now whether it was with pleasure or the reverse. She was looking past me. Then she turned with a sort of gasp, and bolted into the house. It must have been just then that she hurt her ankle. I know I turned around to try to see who or what she’d been looking at, but I didn’t make anything of it. It was something, though, or somebody.” I nodded. “That’s it,” I said. “There’s something behind, that Judy and her mother know more about than we do. Wheels within wheels, you know.” “All right,” he said, getting up with a rueful sort of laugh, “I won’t throw a monkey-wrench into the machinery just yet. We’ll let another day go by and see what happens. But if nothing does happen within the next twenty-four hours, I think it will be a case for the police.” CHAPTER V THE LEGS OF A SUIT OF PAJAMAS