nswered. "And I am
very sure Penny wants him back, too.... The mother is one of the
sweetest, gentlest, most tragic women I have ever met--and you have seen
Penny for yourself.... The disgrace has been very hard on them. It would
be splendid if Roger Crain would come back and redeem himself."

Half an hour later Bonnie Dundee, in the file room of _The New York
Evening Star_, was in possession of the bound volume of that newspaper
for the month of May, 1922. On the front page of the issue of May 3,
under the caption which Serena Hart had quoted so accurately, was a
picture of a young, laughing Nita Leigh, her curls bobbed short, a rose
between her gleaming teeth. And in the issue of May 4 appeared two
pictures side by side--exotic, straight-haired, slant-eyed Anita Lee,
who had found life so insupportable that she had ended it, and the same
photograph of living, vital Nita Leigh.

When he returned the files he asked the girl in charge:

"Does this copyright line beneath this picture--" and he pointed to the
photograph of Nita which had appeared erroneously, "--mean that the
picture was syndicated?"

The girl bent her head to see. "'Copyright by Metropolitan Picture
Service'," she read aloud. "Yes, that's what it means. When _The Evening
Star_ was owned by Mr. Magnus, he formed a separate company called the
Metropolitan Picture Service, which supplied papers all over the country
with a daily picture service, in mat form. But the picture syndicate was
discontinued about five years ago when the paper was sold to its present
owners."

"Are their files available?" Dundee asked.

"If they are, I don't know anything about it," the girl told him, and
turned to another seeker after bound volumes of the paper.

"It doesn't matter," Dundee assured her, and asked for a sheet of blank
paper, on which he quickly composed the following telegram, addressed to
Penny Crain:

"PLEASE SEARCH FILES ALL THREE HAMILTON PAPERS WEEK OF MAY FOURTH
TO ELEVENTH YEAR OF NINETEEN TWENTY TWO FOR STORY AND PICTURES ON
SUICIDE ANITA LEE ARTISTS MODEL STOP SAY NOTHING TO ANYONE NOT EVEN
SANDERSON IF HE IS THERE STOP WIRE RESULT"

In his hotel, while impatiently awaiting an answer from Penny, Dundee
passed the time by scanning all the New York papers of Thursday and
Friday, on the chance of meeting with significant revelations concerning
the private life of Dexter Sprague or Juanita Leigh Selim united by
death--in the press,