Then he grinned. “I’d found a new way of climbing up the outside of the house--all the way to the roof. I went up yesterday, and she saw me going by her window and came out and climbed up too. Then she came all the way down. Not so bad for a girl, because there’s one place where it’s kind of tricky. And then we took my new rifle and shot a tin can off a fence post. She can shoot as well as I can. I don’t see what _she_ wants to get married for. I don’t believe she does, either.” Marriage was so evidently incomprehensible to Punch, except as a last resort after the more enjoyable resources of living had come to an end, that I didn’t take this last observation so very seriously. We were saved from discussing it by the arrival just then of Judy herself. Punch saw her before I did. “Hello!” he exclaimed. “How did you get here?” She came over and kissed me before she answered, and would have ignored his question altogether if he hadn’t repeated it. “Oh, in Trumble’s Ford,” she said. “At least I hope it was Trumble’s. It was standing there in the yard where he always leaves it.” “Well,” Punch said, getting up decisively, “as long as you’re here, I think I’ll go back.” “Brotherly love!” she commented, with a grin. Punch explained--to me, rather than to her, “There ought to be somebody in the house.” “There were at least twenty when I left,” Judy remarked. “Florists’ people, upholsterers.... Heaven knows what!” “That’s why,” said Punch. “Look here, I’m going to drive the Ford back. You can come along on my bike.” “I like your nerve!--Oh, it’s all right. Go along.” She didn’t turn back to me until she’d seen him out of the cottage and had heard the Ford go rattling away. It didn’t seem credible that she was going to be married three days from now. She looked, standing there hatless, disheveled, in her tumbled slip of a dress, not a day over fifteen. She’d been bickering with her brother like a little girl. What did she know--what could she possibly understand--about marriage? “I had a lot of nice things all ready to say to you”--she turned back to me now with a funny little grimace of perplexity--“and Punch has put them all out of my head.” “Never mind them. And don’t blame Punch. He’s worrying about the famous necklace.” “Oh, damn the necklace!” she cried. She might well enough have used an exclamation like that off-hand, humorously, or by way of experiment to see if I’d be shocked. But she didn’t use it in any of these ways. The thing had struck a nerve somehow. “That’s a reasonable enough wish,” I said, “on general principles. But why particularly?” “Did you see that silly story in the paper?” she asked. “About how Gran was going to give it to me for a wedding present? It gave mother a jolt, all right, when she read it yesterday at breakfast.” “She hadn’t wanted it published, then?”