“He was. And his manner toward me excited my admiration. His weakness is evidently that he mustn’t be surprised. Do you remember him this morning, completely disconcerted, unable to contribute more than a disjointed word here and there to the talk, floundering in the presence of the unexpected? But evidently he’d foreseen the probability of an encounter with me this afternoon, and he sustained it with complete _sang froid_. Everybody else was discussing Judy’s trip to town with her bridegroom. Nobody questioned but that was where she was spending the day. He knew that I knew that she hadn’t gone to town, that she’d spent the day, or a good part of it, surreptitiously with him. Yet he confronted me without batting an eye, without attempting a private explanation, or even a private signal entreating me not to give them away. He was, I felt, in the circumstances almost formidably self-possessed. “His self-possession didn’t last him through the afternoon, however. Fate had another surprise in store for him.” “What was the surprise?” I asked. “That’s the point of my story,” he said. “But let me tell it in order. The fact that it doesn’t make sense makes it more important to approach it methodically. “Before Judy arrived with her bridegroom, I had seen every one of the guests in that house, including Mr. Alexander Corbin and excepting only the bridegroom himself. There was no one among them whom I recognized as a professional jewel thief. Mr. Bruce Applebury then arrived with Judy and I didn’t recognize him either. I had drawn blank as far as my particular errand to the house was concerned. But I was diverted from thoughts of my failure by something I saw happening under my eyes. “I saw enacted a scene of perfectly tragic intensity, and I haven’t the remotest idea now what it meant. I can tell it all in a very few words, because the scene itself had no accompanying words at all. “Judy, as I say, arrived in the car with Mr. Bruce Applebury. They were surrounded at once by a group of young people who had been waiting for them on the lawn, clamoring for the rehearsal to begin. I looked at Mr. Applebury, realized that I didn’t know him and realized, further, that I didn’t like him. He is self-important and oppressively correct. He looked not sulky, exactly--mulish, that’s better. And victorious. Like a bad-tempered parent who has just beaten one of his children and has succeeded in persuading himself of his own righteousness. “As for Judy, she was like an automaton; an amazingly life-like, well-made automaton, capable of going where she should, answering questions, even of responding in an appropriate manner to jokes. Perhaps I shouldn’t have perceived how perfectly galvanic all this was if I hadn’t happened to be standing where I intercepted the one look she turned upon her mother.