Miss Withers Regrets Read Online Free

recognized, that of Jed Nicolet, a hotshot lawyer with offices in the Empire State, who always spent his summers out here in a big house half a mile down the road that hadn’t been changed in thirty years.
    For some reason the two men were cataloguing Cairns’s library. Midge wished they would go away and let him sleep.
    “He could have let somebody else pick ’em out. Not his wife—I don’t think Helen ever reads anything except maybe the ads in Vogue. But her sister—”
    “I can speak for her,” Nicolet said. “Lawn Abbott doesn’t read anything except modern poetry. By the way I wish she’d show up. There’s a girl who—” He stopped short. “Say, look here, Bennington! Listen to this—the book just fell open!”
    Bennington. That would be Ava’s husband, Commander Sam Bennington, who’d retired from the Navy six months ago to sit on his big behind and help spend Ava’s money. He was still talking. “Or he could have ordered his books by the linear foot, to match the color scheme.”
    “Sam, I said look here!” There was something in Jed Nicolet’s voice so compelling that Midge couldn’t resist poking his head up above the back of the divan. Both men were eagerly bent over a slender red volume which Nicolet had taken from a case near where he stood at the far end of the room. The young lawyer’s fox face was alight with eagerness. “Listen to this!”
    “Wait!” Bennington suddenly said. He turned and started towards the divan. Behind him Jed Nicolet hastily whipped the book back into the shelves again. Then he, too, converged on Midge.
    “Spying on us, eh?” Bennington growled unpleasantly. “Get up!”
    Midge started to rise and then sank quickly back again. “Oh, no,” he retorted. “I don’t bite on that one.”
    “You sneaking little eavesdropper—”
    “How do you make that out? I was here first.”
    “Take it easy, Sam,” Jed Nicolet put in. “Look, Beale, this is a little awkward. We didn’t know you were here.”
    “That goes double. I didn’t even expect to see you at this party, not after the trouble you had with Cairns.”
    Nicolet hesitated. “Sure, why not? After all, Helen is—well, she’s Helen. And Lawn is a very good friend of mine. After all, why hold a grudge? The vet did pull Wotan through. He limps a little on one leg, that’s all. Spoils him for show. But I thought it over and I realized that Cairns may not have seen him after all—a black Dane on a dark night. I decided this is too small a town to hold a grudge in.”
    Commander Bennington snorted. “I still say a man should know if he ran his car smack into a two-hundred-pound dog. But never mind that. Look, Beale. About what we were talking about—”
    “I didn’t hear a thing,” Midge hastily assured them. And then the tension was broken by the booming voice of Mame Boad as she swept in upon them through the doorway.
    “Well, what did you find?” she demanded breathlessly. “I’m so impatient that I—” She stopped short as she saw their expressions.
    “We were just talking about things,” Nicolet admitted.
    “And that reminds me,” Mrs. Boad cried. “This is a charming house Huntley Cairns has thrown together, all full of gadgets and cute as a bug’s ear. I like it, even if I do miss the nice old-fashioned place that used to stand here. But what this house needs is the patter of little feet, and I mean paws. Next litter of pups my bitch has, I’m going to make Huntley buy one for Helen.” Here she cocked a quizzical eye. “Or doesn’t our host like dogs?”
    “The question before the court,” Jed Nicolet told her, “is how young Beale feels about them.”
    Mame Boad blinked. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! Don’t mind him. He looks to me like a man who’s just crazy about dogs.”
    They all looked at Midge. “Well, in a way I am,” he admitted. “Only the doctors said that my asthma was caused by dog hairs, so I—” He gulped. “What’s everybody so serious for,