Mary could not deny it.
“It strikes me,” said Sallie, quite quietly, “that it’s on the cards that friend Harter may actually find himself committed for trial, on a charge of manslaughter.”
Nobody else had dared to say it.
And Sallie was right, as she almost always is.
It was, of course, a local jury, and the coroner was a local man. The state of affairs was perfectly well-known to them.
The coroner was a decent little fellow—and the dead boy’s father was in court. There was not a word spoken to connect his name with that of Mrs. Harter.
With her, he dealt very briefly and mercifully, and she looked ill enough to justify it. Her answers were given almost inaudibly, but always straight to the point. When the coroner thanked her, and said that would do, she walked straight out of the room, and went away.
She passed quite close to me, and I saw her face before she had pulled down her veil. It looked as though she had not slept for a long, long while.
Then Mrs. Kendal was called.
Her account of what she had seen was, of course, emphatic, detailed, and circumstantially accurate. She made it perfectly clear that the accident was due entirely to Harter’s driving. The question of his sobriety was pressed very hard, and the medical evidence from the cottage hospital was damaging, on that point. I was asked if he had been drinking during the evening, and so were one or two others. None of the evidence was absolutely damning, but none of it could create a favorable impression.