But too far Victoria dared not go. There could be no shadow of doubt that the old lady was in her right mind and able to make a will, and upon this will the disposal of the whole Corbin fortune depended. She could found a theological seminary with it if she liked. To make it harder for Victoria--as if it weren’t hard enough already--she had not, during the past three or four years, got on very well with Judy. Within the last few months we who were her friends had vaguely understood that the difficulty had got a good deal worse, and Judy was, for a while, a declared rebel. Victoria had been half frantic between the necessity of winning Judy back and keeping all echoes of the trouble from reaching Mrs. Corbin’s ears. This acute phase had passed somehow, and Judy had come back, curiously sobered and, superficially at least, tractable. Now, of course, everything was lovely. Judy was going to be married within a week to a man of whom not only her mother, but, marvelous to relate, old Mrs. Corbin as well, heartily approved. The old lady had never seen the man himself, for she never went east, and no member of the Applebury clan had ever crossed the Alleghenies. But they were the Appleburys of East Weston, Massachusetts; cautious, solid, not too vulgarly rich. The family fortune had suffered somewhat, we understood, from their Toryism during the Revolutionary War. It was a good bet that they’d endure as long as Plymouth Rock. Anyhow, they might be supposed to be capable of managing Judy. The girl was safe now, old Mrs. Corbin thought, for life. Victoria may have thought so too, but I take the liberty to doubt it. Safe, anyhow, probably for the next four or five years. And if there were an explosion then (I wouldn’t put it by Victoria to reflect) it wouldn’t so frightfully matter, since the old lady would almost certainly have been gathered to her fathers before that time. _Nunc dimittis_, anyhow. For Punch would certainly never make any trouble. He could get on with anybody. Even with his grandmother. I looked across at him now. He was lost in a brown study, probably about Monsieur Dupin or Sherlock Holmes, or some of their more recent successors. “When are your mother and Judy coming down?” I asked. “Oh, Judy’s here,” he told me. “She came yesterday afternoon. Mother was to have come with her, but she didn’t. She’ll come to-day, I expect. She’d better, because the whole gang is coming to-morrow and the house is still something awful. Decorators and curtain hangers working around all over the place. Grandmother’s room is about the only one that isn’t in a mess, and we’re not allowed in there.” I could easily understand the need for all this renovating. The hospitality of the old house hadn’t been taxed to capacity, as it was going to be for this wedding, in years. “How is Judy?” I asked. “All right,” he said, a little doubtfully. “Well, I assume?” “Sure,” he said.