“She pressed her lips together--you know the sort of face she makes--and wasn’t going to tell me. “I said, ‘Mother hasn’t been accusing you of taking the necklace, has she?’ “She was very indignant then, and said, ‘No, she has not,’ and then she began to cry, and asked me if I’d miss her if she went away; because, she said, she thought she might have to. “I asked her why, and she wouldn’t tell me. So I said she mustn’t mind grandmother even if she did get sort of rough sometimes, and Digs said she didn’t mind grandmother. It wasn’t that at all. She wouldn’t say anything more; wanted to kiss me instead. So I went away to think about it.” I remembered old Mr. Smith’s comment on Miss Digby’s manner just after she’d parted from Victoria in the hall that afternoon. “Frightened--or shocked,” he had said, and he had hazarded a guess that she might have been given some order that she didn’t want to carry out. I didn’t mention this to the boy, however. I waited to see what conclusion he’d come to by himself. “I think,” he went on, “that mother must have asked Digs to open the safe for her; just guessed that she might know the combination. And the only thing she’d want the safe open for would be to get the necklace out. I don’t know why she wants to get it out, though, unless to put it in some safer place. Or unless”--he hung fire a moment but he couldn’t turn aside from the pursuit of truth wherever it took him--“or unless mother doesn’t think Gran ought to give Judy the necklace and wants to put it for a while somewhere so that she can’t. Anyhow, it makes it sort of exciting about to-night, doesn’t it?” I cordially agreed that it did. I don’t think Victoria really expected me to come to the dinner, but with a crowd like that--there were more than thirty of us--one more or less couldn’t have mattered much. They solved the problem of my stiff leg by putting me at a card table and giving me a spare chair opposite for my foot. I had Punch on one side of me and his special bridesmaid on the other. Either she was an uncommonly nice girl, or else the cradle and the grave, so to speak, were her specialties, for apparently she didn’t mind in the least having us for her partners. She was very jolly anyhow and deserved a less divided attention than I was able to give her. The rest of the elderly group sat at a table by themselves; old Mr. Ethelbert Smith at Mrs. Corbin’s right at the head of it, Alec at the foot, and Victoria half-way down the side that faced me. The bridal party, lacking the two who had been told off to me, sat, eighteen in all, at an enormous table transversely to the room, Judy at the end of it nearest me, with Bill Grant at her right and Bruce away down at the other end.