“You’ll find it hard to believe, sir,” he went on. “I find it hard myself to believe it now. She looks like a little girl, asleep there. But I really thought, then, that she was as old as I was. She seemed harder. She seemed to have seen a lot of life. I don’t know how she could put it on. It was a sort of defensive armor, I suppose. Anyhow, I didn’t feel I was taking any advantage of her. And I didn’t expect to be any Sir Galahad about it, either. I don’t know that I exactly expected the other thing. I was just willing to let it ride. I’d only just begun to know her then, you see. “Well, I bought a Ford, and she quit her job and we started out. And on that first day together I began to see what she was really like. She kept getting younger, and, well--I don’t know any other word--sweeter; taking off the armor, you know, as she tried me out and came to feel I was all right. “We went across Pennsylvania, through Lancaster and Gettysburg, and hit the old National Trail in Maryland; followed it up into the Cumberland Mountains. We didn’t get on very fast, because whenever we saw anything we thought it would be jolly to stop and do--nice little brooks to wade in; things like that--we stopped and did it. “I did turn out to be, well--a Galahad, after all, though it wasn’t any merit of mine. The thing just took itself for granted, the first time we put up for the night. I won’t talk any brother and sister rot. No brother and sister ever were like that. But we always slept in separate rooms. We didn’t pay any attention to appearances, though. If the rooms happened to be adjoining, it was all the better. We talked through the door. “That lasted a week. And then I couldn’t trust myself any further. We were in love with each other, you see. Oh, we’d been that from the first, but now each of us knew the other knew it. You know what _she’s_ like. She’d never welsh in her life. She’d go through with anything that she started; perfectly reckless, if no one but herself was concerned. “Well, that was all right. We might have got married then and there, and it would have saved a terrible lot of anguish if we had. But by that time I’d come to. I knew how young she was--she’d given that away--and I knew she was a runaway. She’d never told me her name, nor what her people were like. I knew what they must be like, of course. “Well, it struck me that I couldn’t look them in the face, nor Judy, nor even myself, if I took advantage of a child’s escapade like that. I hadn’t any idea of giving her up, but I thought I’d figured out a way to square the thing. I wrote her a letter, and slipped it under her door that last night, and bolted. It seemed the right thing to do, but I knew by instinct I was being a fool all the time.