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 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