Penny flushed, but she accepted the prompting. "I think any of us might have been a little—annoyed," she said steadily, as if striving to be utterly truthful. "Nita told us—" she turned to Dundee, whose pencil was flying, "that Polly had made no excuse at all; in fact, she quoted Polly exactly: 'Sorry, Nita. Can't make it for lunch. I'll show up at your place at 2:30 for bridge.'"
"Nita couldn't bear the least hint of being slighted," Janet Raymond explained, with a malicious gleam in her pale blue eyes. "If it hadn't been for Lois and Hugo—Judge Marshall, I mean—Nita Selim would never have been included in any of our affairs—and she knew it! The Dunlaps can do anything they please, because they're—"
"Please, Janet!" Lois Dunlap cut in, her usually placid voice becoming quite sharp. "You must know by this time that I make friends wherever I please, and that I liked—yes, I was extremely fond of poor little Nita. In fact, I am forced to believe that, of all the women she met in this town, I was her only real friend."
There was a flush of anger on her lovably plain face as her grey eyes challenged first one and then another of the "Forsyte girls." One or two looked a little ashamed, but there was not a single voice to contradict Lois Dunlap's flat assertion.
"Will you please go on, Pen—Miss Crain?" Dundee urged, but he had missed nothing of the little by-play.
"I wish you would call me Penny so I'd feel more like a person than a witness," Penny retorted thornily. "Where was I?... Oh, yes! Nita cooled right off when Lois reminded her that Polly was always abrupt like that—" and here Penny paused to grin apologetically at the girl with the masculine-looking haircut, "and then we all went into the private dining room, where Nita had ordered a perfectly gorgeous lunch, with a heavenly centerpiece of green-striped yellow orchids—Well, I don't suppose you're interested in what we ate and things like that—" she hesitated.
"Was there anything unusual in the conversation—anything like a quarrel?" Dundee prompted.
"Oh, no!" Penny protested. "Nothing happened out of the ordinary at all—No, wait! Nita received a letter by messenger—or rather a note, when we were about half through luncheon—"
There was a low, strangled-in-the-throat cry from someone. Who had uttered it Dundee could not be sure, since his eyes had been on his notebook. But what had really interrupted Penny Crain was a crash.