General Kendal took her by the shoulders and half pushed, half lifted her, on to the steps. Mary Ambrey, quite resolutely, did the rest. Claire was screaming and struggling in her grasp as we turned and drove away. Mrs. Kendal, a woman of great determination, was able to command herself in a very few moments and to give Mary a fairly lucid account of what had happened. Her story, and later on, of course, the evidence at the inquest, made the facts clear enough. At the bottom of the avenue is a very sharp turn into the high road, which was negotiated by General Kendal with his usual excessive caution. Immediately beyond it, a small bridge spans the river running beneath the road, protected only by white wooden railings and a low stone parapet. “We heard the Ford behind us, and Puppa said to me, ‘I hope they won’t try and pass us on the bridge.’ Those were his very words,” said Mrs. Kendal to Mary. “I looked round, as I always do, so as to tell him if anything was coming, and I saw the Ford car, as plainly as possible in the moonlight, take the corner of your drive going much too fast. Oh, much too fast. I immediately said to my husband, ‘Oh, what a dangerous thing to do. I don’t believe that Mr. Harter knows how to drive,’ I said. Of course, Puppa couldn’t look round himself, but I did, and I saw the accident happen.” Her face whitened again dreadfully, but she went on, although she sobbed now and then. “I suppose he tried to right the car after taking the corner so sharply, for it seemed to swerve across the road to the left and then suddenly to the right. That was just as they reached the bridge. It seemed to happen in a flash, and yet one saw it coming.... The car crashed straight into the railings. I saw something spin up into the air--large and dark--and come down again, and the car turned over sideways and hung over the water half on the road, half in the air, somehow caught in the railings.” Poor Mrs. Kendal was shuddering violently. Her account of the tragedy was afterwards proved to be substantially correct. The wheel tracks in the dust of the high road accurately followed the lines that she had described. The large, dark thing that had flown up and come down again was the spare wheel, somehow ripped clean off the car. It was that which had killed Bill Patch. Harter had been flung clear and had landed in the mud of the river bed, nearly dry at that time of year. He was not hurt. The two on the back seat--old Carey and Mrs. Harter--were flung against the stone parapet. They picked up the woman on the road, screaming. Carey, who was probably killed on the spot, had somehow been caught in the wreckage. (When I got down there, Mrs. Harter had been taken away, into the cottage hospital, which mercifully was not far off.)