“It would be a perfect crime, a marriage like that, for Judy. Bruce isn’t a monster, nor a villain, nor anything like that. But he’s stiff and self-satisfied, and bull-headed, and he hasn’t the imagination of a good Ford car. He’d try to break Judy on the wheel without knowing he was doing it. “I don’t think he _could_ break her, but he might drive her to almost anything.--Well, I put all of that and a whole lot besides, into that letter, and then went out on the veranda where she was sitting and handed it to her.” “I’ll tell the world he did,” came a sleepy voice from the couch. “I could have killed him. He explained afterward he thought I could tuck it in my dress.” “Well,” I asked, “why didn’t you?” She opened her eyes and looked at me with a hopeless expression. “What do you think we wear?” she asked me. “Corsets? All I had on, that night, besides my shoes and stockings was a shirt and a step-in--and my dress, of course. Where do you think the letter would have stopped if I’d stuck it down inside?” It came as a shock to me to realize that this time-honored repository, consecrated by tradition to the implements of intrigue, love-notes, keep-sakes, and so on, had become as obsolete as a sedan chair, but there was no getting away from the logic of the facts. Judy, still curled up on the couch, was broad awake now, and went on telling me about it. “I saw Bruce bearing down on me, so I shoved the letter down into that silly Chinese vase that people are always dropping cigarettes into, although I knew I’d have a fearful time getting it out. If I could have been sure what line Bill had taken in his letter I’d have hung on to it and seen the thing through with Bruce then and there. But I had to read it first. So I climbed out of my window in the middle of the night and got it and read it, and then spent the rest of the time until daylight riding around on Punch’s bicycle, deciding what I’d do. “Poor little Punch! I wouldn’t have cared except that he saw the whole thing. He saw me hide the letter in the first place, and he knew when I went out to get it. I don’t know what he thought.” “I can guess what he thought,” I said. “He thought it had something to do with the loss and the return of the necklace. That’s what I’d have thought too, if he’d told me about it. Now it seems that the necklace had nothing to do, from start to finish, with the whole affair.” They looked at me and looked at each other. Bill drew a long, heart-felt sigh of dissent. “Hadn’t it just!” he said. “It was that infernal necklace that made all the trouble, really.” CHAPTER XIII STUNG! I saw, though, by the way he pulled himself up, that he wasn’t going to tell me about it; not then, anyhow. He walked to the window, and then looked at his watch. “I’m off,” he said decisively. “It’s almost broad daylight now, and I don’t want to waste any time getting things started.” “You can’t get a public official out of bed in any such ungodly hour as this,” I protested.