“It was a look--it’s a strong word, but I mean it--of horror, the look of one still incredulous over a betrayal. Something had happened to her that had never entered into her calculations as a possibility when we saw her in the summer-house this morning, although I thought she was facing some rather queer possibilities then.” I couldn’t bear to have it spun out any longer. “What happened?” I demanded. “Get to the point, man, and tell me.” “Nothing happened,” he said. “Nothing, at least, until after the scene was over. They went ahead and had their rehearsal. I watched. I watched all of them, even Alexander Corbin. Particularly I watched our young friend Bill Grant. “He had already had his surprise. But I swear I don’t know how he got it. He hadn’t had a significant look or word, let alone an intelligible message, either from his cousin or from Judy. And yet he looked like a man in a daze. When it came time for him to produce the ring and hand it to the bridegroom, a good stiff nudge was not enough to bring him to. He had to be spoken to, and then he responded like a somnambulist. “I simply can’t describe the intensity of the feeling that was shared, in some inexplicable way, by Judy and those two young men. And what made a nightmare of it was that no one seemed to perceive it but myself.--Oh, Victoria may have been a little unnaturally alert. She’d taken that look from Judy square in the face; though without flinching, so that I wonder now whether she knew what it meant. To the others it was simply the rehearsal of a wedding, to the usual accompaniment of jokes and giggles.” “How about Punch? Didn’t he see anything?” “No, I don’t think he did. He was entirely serious, of course; scrupulous about doing his part exactly as he was told. One of his hands showed a tendency to stray into his pocket, but he corrected that when his mother spoke to him about it. No, Punch had something else on his mind and I don’t think he saw a thing. “Yet I can swear that if those three people had been Italians, there’d have been a flash of a stiletto. But who would have wielded it and who’d have got it, I don’t know. “Something did happen at last, just when the rehearsal was over. Some one, perhaps two or three of them at once, said to Applebury, ‘Now’s when you kiss her.’ “Judy turned to him and said, without any expression in her face at all, ‘Are you going to? You can if you like, of course.’ “He went rather red and stood looking at her like a fool. Angry I should say, rather than embarrassed. I don’t think he’d embarrass easily. He has no misgivings about himself. “She didn’t give him more than a second to make up his mind. Then she reached out a hand for the other man. Some fool laughed and said, ‘Are you going to kiss him instead?’, but nobody else made that mistake. Something about her gesture silenced the lot of them.