Mrs. Swanson had not yet retired, and, upon learning that the chief was one of her late callers, summoned us at once to the drawing-room. She had one of those splendid faces seen occasionally in the aged, where strength of mind or religious fervour has brought endurance of lifelong secret pain of body or soul. The calmness of a noble resignation looked forth in a slight clouding of her clear eyes and expressed itself in the faint traces of suppression about her mobile lips. The gleaming, snow-white hair, combed straight back from a forehead of a remarkable breadth in a woman, invested her like an aureole. She was a woman probably of sixty years. “You will appreciate, gentlemen, I trust,” she said in a low voice of refined modulation, “that I have endured much and am still suffering.” “It is a very painful errand we are on, Mrs. Swanson, and we will endeavour to be brief,” said Lanagan in a voice that a Chesterfield might have envied for courteous inflection and gentleness of expression, “but nevertheless it is an errand that must be performed.” He glanced at the chief, who nodded. “Speaking as a newspaper man,” continued Lanagan, “it is my wish at all times to spare the feelings of those, particularly women, with whom I am brought into relation. But the true newspaper man is a seeker after truth, and he must follow as definite a path as the police follow.” There was an eloquent pause. She gazed from one to the other during the interim, as though striving to read their thoughts. It was evident that the undercurrent that these skilled cross-examiners intended to convey had carried home. “Well?” finally. Neither Lanagan nor Leslie spoke. There was another pause. She said at last: “You have some information to impart to me? Or some information to seek?” “We desire to inform you,” said Leslie slowly, and with just a shade more of hardness in his tone as the detective began to work in him, “that we have under arrest the confessed murderer of your husband.” She leaned involuntarily forward in her chair and grasped the arms so hard that her knuckles showed white through the fair skin of her hands. “And we desire to inform you,” added Lanagan quickly, “that the name of your husband’s murderer is Charles Thorne; and we desire to ask you what the motive was for the murder of your husband by Charles Thorne; _and why, when you suspected that Charles Thorne was the murderer, you did not immediately notify the police?_” Her hands slowly relaxed their grip on the chair arms as she sank back into its depths. Curiously, in the way the light struck down at her hair and her face, it seemed that the beautiful halo of white that had invested her, and the delicate, well-preserved whiteness of her skin, turned suddenly to dirty grey. If ever the blight of age settled visibly in fact or in fiction, it settled upon her then.