oman....

Finally, Ralph Hammond had loved Nita and wanted to marry her.

Was it possible that Nita Selim's only crime, into which she had been
led by her infatuation for Dexter Sprague, had been to demand, secretly,
financial compensation from a husband who had married and deserted her,
a husband who, believing her dead, had married again?

But who was the man whose picture--to spin a new theory--Nita had
recognized as that of her husband among the male members of the cast of
"The Beggar's Opera," when Lois Dunlap had proudly exhibited the
"stills" of that amateur performance?

With excitement hammering at his pulses, Dundee took the bunch of
photographs which Lois Dunlap had willingly given him, and studied the
picture that contained the entire cast--the picture which had first
attracted Nita's attention. And again despair overwhelmed him, for every
one of his possible male suspects was in that group....

But he could not keep his thoughts from racing on.... Men who stepped
out of their class and went on parties with chorus girls frequently did
so under assumed names, he reflected. Serena Hart was authority for the
information that Nita's had been a sudden marriage. Was it not entirely
possible that the man who married Nita in 1918 had done so half-drunk,
both on liquor and infatuation, and that he had not troubled to explain
to Nita his motives for having used an assumed name or to write in his
real name on the application for a marriage license? Had Nita's private
detective journeyed out to _Hamilton_ years ago in a fruitless attempt
to locate "Matthew Selim?"

Bonnie Dundee lay awake for hours Friday night turning these and a
hundred other questions over and over in his too-active mind, and slept
at last, only to awake Saturday with a plan of procedure which he was
sensible enough to realize promised small chance of success.

And he was right. Not in Manhattan, or in any of the other boroughs of
New York City, did he find any record of a marriage license issued to
Juanita Leigh and Matthew Selim. Not only was it entirely probable that
Juanita Leigh was a stage name and that Nita had married conscientiously
under her real name, but it was equally possible that the license had
been secured in New Jersey or Connecticut.

When he gave up his quest at noon Saturday and returned to his hotel,
Dundee bought at the newsstand a paper whose headline convinced him that
Sergeant Turner was, at that moment, even more di