nto the dining room, their eyes fixed in horror
upon Bonnie Dundee.

He spoke again, his voice very clear, but slow and weighted with a
dreadful significance:

_"Mrs. Dunlap, step on the bell beneath the dining table!"_

Lois Dunlap dropped the empty whiskey glass, her face suddenly wiped of
all expression.

"Step on that bell, Mrs. Dunlap--_just as you did before_!"

As if hypnotized, Lois Dunlap began to grope with the toe of her right
pump for the slight bulge under the rug which indicated the position of
the bell used for summoning the maid from the kitchen.

With a strangled cry Tracey Miles lunged across the few feet which
separated the woman and himself, seized her arm and whirled her
violently away from the table.

"_Do you want to kill my wife, too?_" he panted, his usually florid face
the color of putty. "You--_you_--!"

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

"That would be impossible, Miles," Dundee said deliberately. "_For your
wife is already dead!_" Then his clear words rang out like the knell of
doom:

"Tracey Arthur Miles, I arrest you for the murder of your wife, known as
Juanita Leigh Selim, and for the murder of Dexter Sprague. And it is my
duty to warn you that anything you say may be used against you."

Tracey Miles lifted his ashen face and stared at the detective blankly,
as though he had gone deaf and blind. "All--over--isn't it? May I--have
a--drink?" he managed to articulate at last.

"Poor devil! He needs it," the too-soft-hearted young detective told
himself, as Miles poured a drink from the almost empty whiskey decanter
and raised the little glass to his lips.

"I have--nothing--to say!" the murderer gasped thickly, then fell
heavily to the floor.

* * * * *

It was three-quarters of an hour later. District Attorney Sanderson,
Captain Strawn and Dundee were alone in the house where Nita "Selim" had
been murdered and where her husband had confessed his crimes by
committing suicide. The morgue ambulance had come and gone....

"I should have known," Dundee admitted ruefully, as the three men
entered Nita's bedroom, "that so ingenious a criminal as Tracey Miles
would not have failed to provide against the possibility of discovery.
He must have seized an opportunity to spill cyanide of potassium into
the decanter when my eyes were off him for a moment--and upon Lois
Dunlap."

"I'm glad he did," Sanderson said curtly. "But it was ghastly that poor
Lois h