"What else?"
"I went out of the room, screeching to Joseph in the hall, and master came in from outside the front door, where he was waiting, all peaceful and ignorant, for his pipe, little thinking what there was so close to him. I screeched out all the more, gentlemen, when I remembered the quarrel that had took place at dinner that afternoon, and I knew it was nobody but Mr. Herbert that had done the murder."
The witness was sharply told to confine herself to evidence.
"It couldn't be nobody else," retorted Betsy, who, once set going, was a match for any cross-examiner. "There was the cloak to prove it. Mr. Herbert had gone out in the cloak that very night, and the poor dead gentleman was lying on it. Which proves it must have come off in the scuffle between 'em."
The fact of the quarrel, the facts connected with the cloak, as well as all other facts, had been mentioned by the learned Serjeant Seeitall in his opening address. The witness was questioned as to what she knew of the quarrel: but it appeared that she had not been present; consequently could not testify to it. The cloak she could say more about, and spoke of it confidently as Mr. Herbert's.
"How did you know the cloak, found under the dead man, was Mr. Herbert's?" interposed the prisoner's counsel, Mr. Chattaway.
"Because I did," returned the witness.
"I ask you how you knew it?"
"By lots of tokens," she answered. "By the shining black clasp, for one thing, and by the tears and jags in it, for another. Nobody has ever pretended it was not the cloak. I have seen it fifty times hanging up in Mr. Herbert's closet."
"You saw the prisoner going out in it that evening?"