“He’s working like a house afire. Anita is conscious. Fay is going to pull through, all right. Another hour and it would have been too late.”

“What happened?” Mason asked.

“Someone dumped sleeping medicine in the powdered chocolate, or else in the sugar.”

“Any suspicions?” Mason asked.

She said, “Fay was marrying Dane Grover. I gather from her letters he’s a wealthy but shy young man who had one bad experience with a girl years ago and had turned bitter and disillusioned, or thought he had.

“I got here around one o’clock, I guess. Fay had sent me the keys. As soon as I switched on the light and looked at Fay’s face I knew that something was wrong. I tried to wake her up and couldn’t. I finally shook some sense into Anita. She said the chocolate did it. Then I called Della. That’s all I know about it.”

“The cups they drank the chocolate from?” Mason asked. “Where are they?”

“On the kitchen sink—unwashed.”

“We may need them for evidence,” Mason said.

“Evidence, my eye!” Louise Marlow snorted. “I don’t want the police in on this. You can imagine what’ll happen if some sob sister spills a lot of printer’s ink about a bride-to-be trying to kill herself.”

“Let’s take a look around,” Mason said.

The lawyer moved about the apartment. He paused as he came to street coats thrown over the back of a chair, then again as he looked at the two purses.

“Which one is Fay Allison’s?” he asked.

“Heavens, I don’t know. We’ll have to find out,” Aunt Louise said.

Mason said, “I’ll let you two take the lead. Go through them carefully. See if you can find anything that would indicate whether anyone might have been in the apartment shortly before they started drinking the chocolate. Perhaps there’s a letter that will give us a clue, or a note.”

The doctor, emerging from the bedroom, said, “I want to boil some water for a hypo.”

“How are they coming?” Mason asked, as Mrs. Marlow went to the kitchen.

“The brunette is all right,” the doctor said, “and I think the blonde will be soon.”

“When can I question them?”

The doctor shook his head. “I wouldn’t advise it. They are groggy, and there’s some evidence that the brunette is rambling and contradictory in her statements. Give her another hour and you can get some facts.”

The doctor, after boiling water for his hypo, went back to the bedroom.

Della Street moved over to Mason’s side and said in a low voice, “Here’s something I don’t understand, Chief. Notice the keys to the apartment house are stamped with the numbers of the apartments. Both girls have keys to this apartment in their purses. Fay Allison also has a key stamped 702. What would she be doing with the key to another apartment?”