have
been only a note. But while she was reading it she frowned, then smiled,
as if something had amused or--or--"

"She smiled like any woman reading a love letter," Carolyn Drake
interrupted positively. "I myself was sure that one of her _many_
admirers had broken an engagement, but had signed himself, 'With all my
love, darling--your own So-and-so!'"

Dundee wondered if even Carolyn Drake's husband, the carefully groomed
and dignified John C. Drake, bank vice-president, had ever sent _her_
such a note, but he did not let his pencil slow down, for Penny was
talking again:

"I think you are assuming a little too much, Carolyn.... But let that
pass. At any rate, Nita didn't say a word about the contents of the note
and naturally no one asked a question. She simply tucked it into the
pocket of her silk summer coat, which was draped over the back of her
chair, and the luncheon went on. Then we all drove over here, and found
Polly waiting in her own coupe, in the road in front of the house. She
told Nita she had rung the bell, but the maid, Lydia, didn't answer, so
she had just waited.

"Nita didn't seem surprised; said she had a key, if Lydia hadn't come
back yet.... You see," she interrupted herself to explain to Dundee,
"Nita had already told us at luncheon that 'poor, darling Lydia,' as she
called her, had had to go in to town to get an abscessed tooth
extracted, and was to wait in the dentist's office until she felt equal
to driving herself home again in Nita's coupe.... Yes, Nita had taken
her in herself," she answered the beginning of a question from Dundee.

"At what time?" Dundee queried.

"I don't know exactly, but Nita said she'd had to dash away at an
ungodly hour, so that Lydia could make her ten o'clock dentist's
appointment, and so that she herself could get a manicure and a shampoo
and have her hair dressed, so I imagine she must have left not later
than fifteen or twenty minutes to ten."

"How did Mrs. Selim get out to Breakaway Inn, if she left her own car
with the maid?"

"You saw her arrive with Lois," Penny reminded him.

"Nita had told us all about Lydia's dentist's appointment when she was
at my house for dinner Wednesday night," Lois Dunlap contributed. "I
offered to call for her anywhere she said, and take her out to Breakaway
Inn in my car today. I met her, at her suggestion, in the French hat
salon of the shop where she got her shampoo and manicure--Redmond's
department store."

"A