“You were with her before the accident?”
“I were!”
“You had been drinking together?”
“Well, sir,” said Mrs. Rastin, impartially, and untying her bonnet-strings, “scarcely what you’d call drinking. It was like this. It were the anniversary of my weddin’ day, and, brute as Rastin always was, and shameful as he treated all my rel’tives in the way of borrowin’, still it’s an occasion that comes, as I say, only once a year, and it seems wicked not to take a little something special, if it’s only a drop of—”
“And after you had been together some time, you walked along Haberdasher Street to East Street.”
“With the view, sir,” explained Mrs. Rastin, “of ’aving a breath of fresh air before turning in.”
“Was the deceased the worse for drink?”
“Oh, no, sir! No, nothing of the kind.” Mrs. Rastin was quite emphatic. “She felt much the better for it. She said so.”
A corroborative murmur came from the crowd behind which Bobbie was hiding; one of the endorsements sounded so much like the tones of his mother that he edged a little further away. He had become interested in the proceedings, and after the great good fortune of getting into the room, he did not want to be expelled by an indignant parent.
“How was it you did not see the omnibus coming along?”