om in
which Nita had been murdered....

"See this!" and Lydia Carr snatched up the powder box from the
dressing-table. Her long, bony fingers busied themselves with frantic
haste, and suddenly, into the silence of the room came the tinkle of
music. "_I_ bought her this--for a present, out of my own money, soon as
I got out of the hospital!" the maid's voice shrilled, over the slow,
sweet, tinkly notes. "It's playing her name song--_Juanita_. It was
playing that song when she died. I stood there in the doorway and heard
it--" and she pointed toward the door leading from Nita's room into the
back hall. "She loved it and used it all the time, because I gave it to
her.... And _this_!"

She set the musical powder box upon the dressing-table and rushed across
the room to one of the several lamps that Dundee had noticed on his
first survey of the room. It was the largest and gaudiest of the
collection--a huge bowl of filigreed bronze, set with innumerable
stones, as large as marbles, or larger. Red, yellow and green stones
that must have cast a strange radiance over the pretty head that had
been wont to lie just beneath it, on the heaped lace pillows of the
chaise lounge, Dundee reflected.

As if Lydia had read his thoughts, she jerked at the little chain which
hung from the bottom of the big bronze bowl against the heavy metal
standard.

"I gave her this--saved up for it out of my own money!" she was assuring
him with savage triumph in proving her point. "And she loved it so she
brought it with us when we came from New York--It won't light! It was
working all right last night, because my poor little girl was lying
there, looking so pretty under the colored lights--"

With strong twists of her big hands Lydia began to unscrew the filigreed
bronze bowl. As she lifted it off she exclaimed blankly:

"Why, look! The light bulb's--_broke_!"

But Dundee had already seen--not only the broken light bulb but the
explanation of the queer noise that Flora Miles had described
hysterically over and over, as "a bang or a bump." The chaise lounge
stood between the two windows that opened upon the drive. And at the
head of it stood the big lamp, just a few inches from the wall and only
a foot from the window frame upon which Dr. Price had pencilled the
point to indicate the end of the imaginary line along which the shot
which killed Nita Leigh Selim had traveled.

The "bang or bump" which Flora Miles had heard had been made by the