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 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 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