IX

“Here,” interrupted Peacock. “I don’t want your doubts or your reasons or your haha airs. I want answers from you, direct answers. Where did you go and what did you do after your threat?”

To this Orr objected. A wrangle ensued. Orr was sustained. Peacock reconstructed his question. Annandale answered that he had gone to Miss Waldron’s, but that he remembered nothing else.

“Is this yours?” Peacock suddenly asked, producing the pistol marked exhibit A.

“Probably,” said Annandale, looking, not at it, but at the ceiling.

“That’s all.”

Annandale got from the stand. Others succeeded him there, experts for the defense, men who recited their qualities and degrees as though they were eating truffles to the sound of trumpets. One after another they testified that liquor can ablate memory partially, wholly; can ablate it regarding events antecedent and subsequent to a rememorated point between; can, moreover, leave the subject in a condition apparently normal yet actually in a state of trance.

“Do you really regard these people as experts?” Peacock with pitying contempt asked of Orr. Then at once in rebuttal were other experts, equally pleased with themselves, humorously disposing of psychical epilepsy, affecting to regard it as a medicolegal myth. Among the spectators the usual jest circulated. The mendacious were subdivided into liars, damned liars, expert witnesses. Yet there you were. But not Orr. Tortuously he involved the deponents in helpful contradictions, smiling at them, at Peacock and the jury, smiling with an air of saying “You see what confounded idiots these imbeciles are.”

But the session was closing. One more witness remained to be called.

“Miss Waldron, will you take the stand?”