comedy dancer for five years. Surely if Nita,
loving and trusting Lydia as she did, had entered into negotiations of
any kind with or concerning her husband during the last year, her maid
would have been the first to know of them. And yet----

Suddenly Dundee jumped to his feet and began to pace the floor of his
hotel bedroom. He was remembering the belated confidence that John C.
Drake, banker, had made to him the morning before--after the discovery
of Dexter Sprague's murder. He recalled Drake's reluctant statement
almost word for word:

"About that $10,000 which Nita deposited with our bank, Dundee.... When
she made the first deposit of $5,000 on April 28, she explained it with
an embarrassed laugh as 'back alimony', an instalment of which she had
succeeded in collecting from her former husband. And, naturally, when
she made the second deposit on May 5, I presumed the same explanation
covered that sum, too, though I confess I was puzzled by the fact that
both big deposits had been made in cash."

_In cash!_

Had Nita, by any chance, been telling a near-truth? Had she been
blackmailing her own husband--a husband who had dared marry again,
believing his deserted wife to be dead--and justifying herself by
calling it "back alimony?"

But--wasn't it, in reality, no matter what coercion Nita had used in
getting the money, exactly that?... _Back alimony! And the price of her
silence before the world and the wife who was not really a wife...._

In a new light, Bonnie Dundee studied the character of the woman who had
been murdered--possibly to make her silence eternal.

Lois Dunlap had liked, even loved her. The other women and girls of "the
crowd"--that exclusive, self-centered clique of Hamilton's most socially
prominent women--must have liked her fairly well and found her
congenial, in spite of their jealousy of her popularity with the men of
the crowd, or they would not have tolerated her, regardless of Lois
Dunlap's championship of her protegee.

Gladys Earle had found her "the sweetest, kindest, most generous person
I ever met"--Gladys Earle, who envied and hated all girls who were more
fortunate than she.

Serena Hart, former member of New York's Junior League and still listed
in the Social Register, had found her the only congenial member of the
chorus she had invaded as the first step toward stardom. And Serena Hart
had the reputation of being a woman of character and judgment, a kind
and wise and great w