"To the best of your recollection," Orr repeated after him. "Now please tell me, had anything occurred that night to impair your memory in any way?" "Well--er--yes. Yes. I had been drinking." "Had you any animosity toward the deceased?" "Toward Loftus? None whatever. On the contrary, he was my best friend." Peacock jumped. "I ask that that be stricken out." Quietly Orr continued: "Had you known Loftus long?" "All my life." "Was he a friend of yours?" "An intimate friend." Orr turned to Peacock. "Your witness." Peacock jumped again. "You say that on the night of the murder you had been drinking. Were you drunk?" Paternally the Recorder looked over and down. "The witness need not answer that unless----" Annandale interrupted him. "I am much obliged to Your Honor, but really I have nothing to conceal. I was drunk, deplorably so." "Habit of yours, is it?" Peacock snapped. Annandale took a monocle from a pocket, screwed it in his eye, looked through it at Peacock, smiled at him, with an air of fathomless good fellowship, answered: "Dear me, no. Is it one of yours?" "Oho!" cried Peacock, pocketing the insult but pouncing at the point, "you were drunk on this occasion only. Got drunk for it, did you?" "No," Annandale blandly and confidentially replied. "You see, don't you know, it was the day of the panic. I had dropped a good lot of money--a good lot, I mean, for me--and, as the saying is, I tried to drown my sorrows." "But you found that they could swim, didn't you? Now, tell me, among these sorrows was not the greatest the one to which your former butler has testified, your late wife's desire for a divorce in order that she might marry Loftus? Is it not a fact that she told you so, and that you then said, 'I'll kill him, I'll kill Royal Loftus like the dog that he is'?" "I recall no such conversation." "What, then, was the nature of the conversation that passed between you and your wife on this particular evening?" "I don't remember." "The conversation and the threat to which your butler has sworn may therefore have occurred without your now recalling it. Is that not so?" "Everything is possible, you know," Annandale answered with a phrase unconsciously borrowed of Orr. "But I doubt it very much for the reason----" "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."