"Habit of yours, is it?" Peacock snapped.
Annandale took a monocle from a pocket, screwed it in his eye, looked through it at Peacock, smiled at him, with an air of fathomless good fellowship, answered: "Dear me, no. Is it one of yours?"
"Oho!" cried Peacock, pocketing the insult but pouncing at the point, "you were drunk on this occasion only. Got drunk for it, did you?"
"No," Annandale blandly and confidentially replied. "You see, don't you know, it was the day of the panic. I had dropped a good lot of money—a good lot, I mean, for me—and, as the saying is, I tried to drown my sorrows."
"But you found that they could swim, didn't you? Now, tell me, among these sorrows was not the greatest the one to which your former butler has testified, your late wife's desire for a divorce in order that she might marry Loftus? Is it not a fact that she told you so, and that you then said, 'I'll kill him, I'll kill Royal Loftus like the dog that he is'?"
"I recall no such conversation."
"What, then, was the nature of the conversation that passed between you and your wife on this particular evening?"
"I don't remember."
"The conversation and the threat to which your butler has sworn may therefore have occurred without your now recalling it. Is that not so?"
"Everything is possible, you know," Annandale answered with a phrase unconsciously borrowed of Orr. "But I doubt it very much for the reason——"