“So what we agreed on was that I was to meet Bruce at the three o’clock train and drive him around a while before we came back to The Oaks and tell him that I wasn’t going to marry him; I’d do anything else he wanted, except that. He could throw me over any way he liked, tell any story he wanted to tell. If he wanted the thing done quietly, I’d pretend to be awfully ill, or grandmother could, and the wedding could be postponed. “It was a perfectly rotten position to put him in, and it wasn’t his fault that he was in it--at least it wasn’t his fault any more than it was mine. I’d never told him I was in love with him. I had told him when he first asked me to marry him that I’d been in love with some one else, but I said I didn’t know where he was and that he was out of my life altogether. Of course I thought that was true. He said he’d take a chance. Well, I was going to have to tell him that the chance turned out to be that the man had come back, neither by his fault nor mine, and that we were in love with each other. It never struck me as possible that Bruce would want to marry me when he knew that. You wouldn’t think it was possible, would you?” “Yes, my dear,” I told her regretfully, “I’m afraid I would.” “Well,” she conceded, “you know more about life than I do. “I met him and we drove off down the Yorkville Road, and I told him the whole thing. He didn’t say a word; just sat there looking blacker and blacker every minute till I’d finished. And then the horrible thing happened. “He told me he’d been stung. He told me what had really happened about the necklace. And the minute he began talking I knew it was true. He told me mother had really taken it--he used perfectly horrible words: ‘fraudulently hypothecated it.’ That means she’d pretended it was hers and got the bank to let her have some money on it; a lot of money--twenty-five thousand dollars. She’d tried to raise the money to get it back and she couldn’t. And when they found out that the necklace wasn’t hers they’d threatened her, Bruce said, with a criminal prosecution. Of course she was almost crazy with worry about it. So she’d gone to _him_, to _Bruce_, and asked him to put up the money to get the necklace back.” That was more than I could listen to in silence. “She went to Bruce!” I cried. “Good God!” “I suppose she couldn’t think of any one else to go to,” Judy said thoughtfully. “It had to be some one she could absolutely count on to keep it quiet. He’d hate a scandal in his family worse than anything else in the world, and of course mother thought, and so did he, that I was as good as married to him.