“I told her in the letter that I loved her, and always would, but that I wanted her to go home to her own people and her own surroundings and take a little while to think it over. I said that after she had thought it over she was to make her choice. “I said it was perfectly possible that when she found herself back among her old friends, she’d think of this adventure of ours as something perfectly insane. If it did seem like that she wasn’t to worry. I’d never try to follow her up, and she could remember it as a pleasant episode. Lord, what a fool I was! I might have known how Judy would take that. “I went on to tell her of course, that I loved her as I never would love anything else in the world, and if she found she still loved me, back home with her feet on the ground, she was to write me a letter and I’d come like a shot. I signed it with my full name, of course, and wrote out my permanent address. And then I wrote a postscript telling her she wasn’t to have any regrets whichever way she decided it, because she’d given me something.... “Well, you know how it is, sir. It looked all right on the page. I thought I meant it; meant that I could be satisfied with what I’d had, even if it stopped there. Of course I was a perfectly doddering fool. “Oh, and I did one more fool thing. I didn’t know how her money was holding out. I was afraid she might be completely strapped. So I put a couple of twenty-dollar bills in the envelope to pay her fare home. “I drove off in the night, and I turned back three times before morning. I wish to God I’d gone all the way back, but I never did. I hung on, somehow, to my fool idea. “Well, of course I began watching for a letter from her within a week. I didn’t know her handwriting nor what the postmark would be, and every time I found a letter addressed in a woman’s handwriting, my heart stopped beating--literally stopped, I mean, for one beat anyhow, and there isn’t a thing the matter with it. “After three months of that I was pretty nearly crazy. I couldn’t go looking for her, you see. I’d sawed myself off that limb by promising her that I wouldn’t. I couldn’t be sure she hadn’t taken me at my word; decided she’d done a perfectly crazy thing--which it was, of course, by all her home standards--and was only hoping that I’d never turn up to remind her of it. My mother saw I was half out of my head about something, and persuaded me finally to go to Italy with her for the rest of the winter. I made extra careful arrangements for my mail to be forwarded, and went. “I came back just in time for Bruce to ask me to be best man at his wedding. I was a little surprised at his doing that, because we’ve never been friends really, but he’s great on family, and going out, as it seemed to him, into the wilds like this, he wanted to rally us around and present a united front. I agreed to it, of course. I’d nothing else to do.