I did sit down myself, though, in my easy chair and filled and lighted a pipe before I answered. It was time, not tobacco, that I wanted. “Of course I’m on your side, Judy,” I said at last. “I’ll be on any side that I’m satisfied is really yours.” Neither of them had followed my example about sitting down. Young Grant was standing in front of my empty fireplace, his hands behind him--locked together, if I could judge by the tension of his shoulders. Judy, who had been wandering restlessly about the room while I got my pipe going, now gave me a rueful sort of smile and came to rest on the arm of my chair. “You haven’t my best interests at heart, have you?” she asked with slightly burlesqued apprehension. “You don’t want to save me from doing something that I’ll always regret?” The words and the manner may have been flippant, but the voice wasn’t. Judy trusted me to understand seriousness without the label of a long face, and I blessed her for her confidence in me. I essayed a small joke of my own. “It’s no good your sitting in my lap,” I told her. “I’m not old enough to be seduced that way. I want to be satisfied which your side really is, before I fall in, that’s all.” “You’re absolutely right, sir,” said Bill seriously. They were the first words he’d spoken. “You ought to be told the whole story before you’re asked to do anything, or even agree to anything.” “No, he’s wrong, Bill,” Judy contradicted him over my head. (She hadn’t stirred, by the way, at my jibe about sitting in my lap.) “He’s got to decide first and hear the story afterward. Really the story hasn’t a thing to do with it, except that he’ll be awfully interested in it--put it in his collection, probably. He knows already, you see, that I mean to marry you and that I’m not going to marry Bruce. Of course if he thinks that because I’m still rather young I shouldn’t be allowed to decide _anything_ for myself--which is a mistake that has been made before....” I saw Bill Grant smile ruefully at that and perceived that he himself had made this mistake. “... if he does think that,” Judy went on, “then, of course, he’ll think I’m wrong anyhow, story or no story. But if he thinks I’m grown up, then he’ll see that I’m the only person who can possibly know whether you’re the man I ought to marry, or Bruce.” “I’ll admit that you’re grown up, my dear.” She kissed me briefly, and sprang to her feet. “Well, then, it’s like this,” she said, turning and facing me very earnestly. “Do you want to get into a whole lot of trouble that you needn’t get into at all? Do you want mother to quarrel with you, and grandmother to cut you out of her will, and a whole lot of people to think you’ve been, well--seduced, you know, into doing something that was perfectly frantically foolish? You needn’t, you know. You needn’t let any of these things happen. That’s why I wanted you to decide first. I wouldn’t have you persuaded. But I thought perhaps you’d--just naturally--want to.”