She was not in bed but was lying upon it in a negligee--a silk and lace, pink and white creation which was originally no garment of grief. She was pink and white herself, except for her bobbed hair of bronze and for her big eyes which were blue. She displayed a good deal of herself, especially the beauty of her bosom; she did this not with any evident design of the moment but probably upon the general principle that it was never a disadvantageous thing for her to do. She was alone in the room when I entered and Fred Scofield, who came up with me, dropped back at the door. She gazed at me, making hardly a motion, and waited for me to open the meeting. I did it formally, with that door open behind me; I said the stupid tosh I felt expected to say. “Shut the door and sit down,” said Shirley. The first part was important, so I did it; then I strolled to the foot of her bed and stood. She lay looking at me, one hand holding a cigarette box which she tapped with her fingers; but she wasn’t smoking. I was realizing I had never met up with a murderess before--at least not with a girl who’d done her bit in a bump off for money. Of course since I had, in my own right, a normal list of acquaintances of fair size, I knew a woman or two who’d shot friend husband; but the moving impulse was not financial. The widow--I mean the woman who immediately made herself the widow--in one case happened upon husband with another lady on the wrong landing; in the other case, she’d become peeved about something purely private and so highly sensational when sobbed out on the witness stand, and followed by an effective faint, that the jury not only justified her but acquitted her with cheers. The widow Scofield, lying here on the bed before me, failed to fall in that same class in my mind. I doubted if she would in the emotions of any jury; and some doubt of this nature seemed to flit across the eyes of blue which kept watching me. She was gambling, if not with her life itself, at least with her liberty for life; and her stake, if she won, was the neat little sum of five hundred thousand dollars to enhance her joys of freedom. Elsewhere in this house the aged youth, her husband, lay dead; and whatever was to happen, her chapter with him was concluded and she could not contrive to conceal from me a certain relief at that. Perhaps I imagined it, with my picture of her at her piano last night still haunting my mind; yet I’m not imaginative. I felt her saying to herself, as she gazed at me, “Well, whatever’s to come next, _that’s_ over. Twenty-two with sixty-seven, rejuvenated!” She said aloud to me, “What did you mean by the words on your card?” “If you don’t know,” I said, “why did you change your mind, after you had the card, and send for me?”