And Sallie was right, as she almost always is. It was, of course, a local jury, and the coroner was a local man. The state of affairs was perfectly well-known to them. The coroner was a decent little fellow--and the dead boy’s father was in court. There was not a word spoken to connect his name with that of Mrs. Harter. With her, he dealt very briefly and mercifully, and she looked ill enough to justify it. Her answers were given almost inaudibly, but always straight to the point. When the coroner thanked her, and said that would do, she walked straight out of the room, and went away. She passed quite close to me, and I saw her face before she had pulled down her veil. It looked as though she had not slept for a long, long while. Then Mrs. Kendal was called. Her account of what she had seen was, of course, emphatic, detailed, and circumstantially accurate. She made it perfectly clear that the accident was due entirely to Harter’s driving. The question of his sobriety was pressed very hard, and the medical evidence from the cottage hospital was damaging, on that point. I was asked if he had been drinking during the evening, and so were one or two others. None of the evidence was absolutely damning, but none of it could create a favorable impression. Harter’s own manner was utterly against him, too. One could see the jury disliking him more and more. His impassivity was absolute--after all, he was a solicitor himself--but it struck one very disagreeably, as the coroner dwelt on the frightful results of the smash, as he had not done with any of the other witnesses. Asked whether he had been drinking during the evening, Harter replied in the affirmative, but denied that he had been anything but sober. He gave a very unemphatic account of the accident and “supposed that the car had skidded.” It was not a very tenable theory and it broke down under the examination of the A. A. men. Harter listened to it all with his unwholesome little face quite unmoved. He must have expected the verdict, for when at last it came he did not move a muscle. He was formally committed for trial at the next assizes on a charge of manslaughter. _Chapter Fifteen_ The thing, if it had been done on the stage, would have ended there. The climax had come. It was--it should have been--all over. But the drama of life, if it holds climax, inevitably leads straight on to anticlimax. Things go on ... one can’t pause, as at the end of a chapter, and take things up again after a decent interval. The catastrophe was followed by a series of days and nights that had to be lived through. Harter’s trial came on in a very short while and he was found guilty of manslaughter. He got five years for it. They said that he smiled at the verdict.