She’d never been expansively confidential; reticence was, indeed, one of her outstanding qualities. Victoria complained of her as a close-mouthed little thing who kept everything to herself. But candor--perhaps I shouldn’t put it that way, for I believe the two things naturally go together--candor was not a virtue with her, but simply an irresistible compulsion. She couldn’t even acquiesce at all graciously in a pretense. I consider myself a decently straightforward person, but I’ve been self-convicted a dozen times by a straight look from Judy’s eyes of cowardly flinchings from the plain truth. I don’t think she regards them as cowardly. She isn’t a bit of a prig. She simply doesn’t understand how it can be done. The pungent quality of cynicism which sometimes flavors her speech has always one source--sham. She is cynical of shams. I recalled a remark she had made to me only a day or two before, to the effect that the horridest thing in the world was whitewash. Then, with a start, I remembered the prediction she’d made in the next breath that she was going to be coated with it this week. How much had she known about the necklace then? Anything more than was involved in the newspaper announcement that her grandmother was going to give it to her as a wedding present? In the light of Mr. Smith’s revelations this afternoon, I thought it likely that she had known more; known that the necklace then reposing in the morocco covered box in her grandmother’s safe was an imitation, and that the fact somehow involved her mother’s credit. Didn’t an invincible determination on Judy’s part to save her mother’s credit account for everything the girl was doing--including, even, her agreement to marry a man whom she didn’t love? It was all very well for old Mr. Smith, whose emotions were running cool and thin, to warn me against jumping at conclusions. But I had to jump. I had nowhere else to go. So I nailed my conviction like a flag to this mast. It wasn’t necessary to try to work out all the details. Victoria had done something--probably, in some desperate money crisis, stolen the necklace; she’d always believed it was going to be hers some day--and Judy had agreed to see her through. How had that involved a marriage with Bruce Applebury? Possibly Victoria had sold the necklace to him. Or possibly she’d done something besides steal the necklace. (I found it comparatively easy, that afternoon, to impute anything to Victoria.) At all events the necklace, the real one, had to be recovered, somehow. Was this the errand Judy and Bruce had started upon, this morning under the innocent pretense of buying the wedding ring? Had she really started with him and been compelled, by some unforeseen occurrence, to turn back? Or had she only pretended to go with him in order to be free for some other meeting, under the protection of his cousin?