Probably Strawn, feeling a little hurt at having played
second fiddle all evening, had simply wanted to get him fussed, was even
now chuckling over the effect of his parting boast....
Much cheered, Dundee lingered in the dining room whose windows he had
made fast against any intrusion, so that his task of guarding the house
alone might be minimized. As he glanced at the table, with its silver
plates heaped with tiny sandwiches of caviar and anchovy paste, its
little silver boats of olives and sweet pickles, he discovered that he
was very hungry indeed....
As he munched the drying sandwiches and sipped charged water--the
various liquors for cocktails on the sideboard offered a temptation
which he sternly resisted--Dundee's thought boiled and churned, throwing
up picture after picture of Nita Selim, alive and then dead; of Penny
Crain--bless her!--helping him at the expense of her loyalty to
life-long friends; of Flora Miles, lying desperately and then confessing
to a shameful theft; of Karen Marshall gallantly playing out the "death
hand"; of Karen's stricken, childish face when she learned that her
elderly husband had met and at least flirted with Nita Selim at a chorus
girls' party....
At that last picture Dundee flushed so that his skin prickled.
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