The arrangement had its importance for me--by that same token it was probably an unlucky one for the nice bridesmaid--since it put all of the principal actors in the drama, or at least all whom I took to be the principal actors, where I could watch their faces. Judy and old Mrs. Corbin I saw in profile; Bill Grant, Bruce Applebury and Victoria faced me squarely. I didn’t neglect the others. One by one I studied them intently. One of them, it seemed impossible to resist the conclusion, must have been Punch’s man in pajamas, who, for some motive less explicable even than the one that had incited the taking of it, had returned the stolen necklace to old Mrs. Corbin’s room last night. Would the same man walk again to-night, I wondered? I think I know something of faces. They’ve been a serious part of my study, at all events, for many years. But there wasn’t one within range of my vision which I could associate at all with an act like that. Anyhow, that didn’t comprise the whole story. That is to say, the theft and return of the necklace did not. Otherwise it would not have involved Judy. And there was no getting away from the fact that she was involved inextricably. She was not now perhaps, as I looked at her, quite the lifeless mechanical thing, the talking doll, which old Eagle-Eye had described her to have been at the rehearsal of her wedding, but she was still a long way from any Judy I had ever known. She was laughing too much and talking too hard. They didn’t converse decorously in pairs down at that table, but called to one another back and forth down the length of it, and oftenest of all I heard her voice, all aglitter, the lovely sensitive shades quite gone out of it. Yes, she was entangled in something. But was it the necklace? The question asked itself so clearly and suddenly in my mind that I started at it. Had Judy a story of her own, which by pure coincidence had fallen thwartwise of the mystery of the necklace? Was the wordless drama old Eagle-Eye had seen enacted this afternoon between the girl and those two young men nothing but a plain tale of common human jealousy? Could the riddle be solved on that hypothesis? “What _is_ Judy doing back there?” the nice bridesmaid asked me. “You’ve been looking steadily past my shoulder without saying a word for about five minutes, and I’m too curious to be polite any longer.” “I’m afraid it’s I who’ve been too curious to be polite,” I apologized contritely. “And she isn’t doing anything, really.” I was going on expatiating, rather feebly I’m afraid, on the feelings of an avowedly sentimental honorary uncle, when Mrs. Corbin cut me short by calling aloud in her vibrant, imperious old voice to Punch. “Come here!” she commanded the boy. “I want to speak to you.” Everybody in the room seemed to realize that something was coming, for Punch walked to her side in complete silence and we all heard what she said to him.