She didn’t respond; she lay waiting, watchfully, and let me look her over and think her over with all the deliberation I wanted. She seemed to me not so slight as that Christina who’d met me at the river ledge with Keeban; but I knew enough about the effect of negligee, and of a figure loosed from a girdle, to allow for more fullness now. Her hair was bronze; but yellow over that bronze would have been easy enough to manage, especially in the dim light of that dock room. Her manner of speech had changed; yet I was wholly sure she was Christina. At the next moment, she admitted it. “I know what you meant, Steve,” she said, speaking my name as she had in that room by the river. “You think you have something on me, do you?” “You’re Christina,” I said. “Right! Call in my step-son Fred and whoever else you care to; I’ve something to confess which I should have told the police this morning--but I didn’t. Yet it didn’t hurt anything to hold it back. Call him in!” She sat straight and raised an arm and pointed to the door in some cabaret imitation of a grand gesture. “Open the door,” she ordered me. I opened it and went out and found Fred. “She’s something to say to us,” I told him. I decided to include nobody else just then, though there were police enough everywhere and all keen to listen. Fred and I went into her room and closed the door. She motioned us to seats beside the bed as though she might be Madame Récamier on her couch receiving a couple of her lesser courtiers. “Fred, I can tell more about the shooting last night; I’m going to do it,” she said, looking at Fred, not at me. “You can decide how much to give out to the police--to the ‘bulls,’” she added, deliberately blunting her speech and gazing at me. She swung back to Fred. “I come from the cabarets, you know; maybe you’ve thought sometimes that I come from worse. Anyway, you treated me like you did.” “I’m sorry,” said Fred and waited. “That I didn’t come from worse wasn’t any fault of Jerry Fanneal. He was hot after me--hot after me.” Here was the start of a counter-attack on me; I felt it and demanded, “When was that?” “Oh, before I married; long before the big surprise to his swell friends and family when he threw Dorothy Crewe into the street. He was comin’ down to the cabarets for a long time. Didn’t you know it, Mr. Steve Fanneal?” “Yes;” I said. “Often I went with him.” “But often not; isn’t that so? Tell the truth!” This was a straight challenge. “Sometimes not,” I granted. “I guess not! Well, you should’ve seen some of those ‘sometimes.’ The boy was crazy; I seen it!” In her excitement, she was forgetting her “g’s” and the tenses she could speak correctly when she tried to; she was a cabaret Récamier now. “Clean crazy. He kept it under when he was back with his swells and you; but when he was down with us, he blew the lid some distance off, I’m telling you. I made him crazier than most, for he couldn’t get me. He thought I’d fall for money. Not me!