as well
read....

Five minutes later Bonnie Dundee was racing through the dining room,
pushing open the swinging door that led into the butler's pantry. Where
the devil were the steps that led down into the basement? A precious
minute was lost before he discovered that a door in the dark back hall
opened upon the steep stairs....

An unshaded light, dangling from the ceiling, revealed the furnace in
one corner of the big basement, laundry equipment in another. He plunged
on.... That must be the maid's room, behind that closed door.... God!
What if she had escaped, while he had been munching caviar and anchovy
sandwiches? A fine guard he'd been!... And it wasn't as if he hadn't had
a dim suspicion of the truth....

The knob turned easily. He flung open the door. And then his knees
nearly gave way, so tremendous was his relief. For there, on the thin
mattress of a white-enameled iron bed, lay the woman he so ardently
desired to see.

She had apparently been asleep, and the noise he had made had startled
her into panicky wakefulness. Instinctively her hand flew to the ruined
left side of her face--that hideous expanse of livid flesh, scarred and
ridged so that it did not look human....

"What--? Who--?" Lydia Carr gasped, struggling to a sitting position,
only to fall back as nausea swept over her.

"You remember me?" Dundee panted. "Dundee of the district attorney's
office. I questioned you this afternoon--"

The woman closed the single eye that had escaped the accident which had
marred her face so hideously. "I--remember.... I'm sick.... I told you
all I know--"

"Lydia, why didn't you tell me that it was your mistress, Mrs. Selim who
did--that?" Dundee demanded sternly, pointing to the woman's sightless
left eye and ruined cheek.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Lydia Carr, still clothed in the black cotton dress and white apron of
her maid's uniform, struggled to a sitting position on the edge of her
basement room bed.

"No, no! That's a lie! It was an accident, I tell you--my own
fault!... Who dared to say Nita--Miss Nita--did it?"

"Better lie down, Lydia," Dundee suggested gently. "I won't want you
fainting. You've had a hard day with the abscessed tooth, the dope the
dentist gave you, and--other things. I don't wonder that you lost your
head, went a little crazy, perhaps--"

The detective's sinister implication seemed to make no impression at all
upon the woman with the scarred face.

"I asked you--" sh