"Coming down that path, Ann fell several times, she vomited, she lost one of her shoes. She fell again, half-way down the spur path leading to the pond. Why did she go that way, and not straight on to the Chalmers house? We don't know, for certain. Took the wrong turn in the moonlight, being sick and confused?--possible. She was found in the water, drowned. Stumbled and fell in, couldn't get out?--that also is possible, remotely possible. Admittedly the circumstantial evidence is imperfect at this point, and it's one of the questions of fact that you, members of the jury, will be called on to decide." Grim, slow, brooding, Hunter returned to the prosecution's table for another sip of water, and Warner's gaze wandered to the face of Judge Terence Mann. _What are you going to do to us, Terence?_ In a sense, the Judge would do nothing. Warner assumed without reservations that the quiet introspective man up there would try his best to preserve an ideal impartiality. It seemed to Warner that Mann was almost devoid of vanity, incredible as that might seem in a judge. No fanaticism in Terence Mann, no insistence on the rightness of a view because it was his own, no false identification of self with idea. Incredible until you remembered that Terence was a judge more or less by accident, an interim appointment later confirmed by an election in which he had peacefully refused to do any serious campaigning. Warner recalled their first meeting ten years ago, soon after Mann had been appointed special prosecutor for an investigation into county road construction frauds. The rats were running, and Terence, a youngish thirty-seven, appeared to be enjoying it. In the book-leather and walnut surroundings of Mann and Wheatley, Terence had looked at first like a revised version of his uncle Norden Mann who had died the year before. A superficial resemblance. Old Norden had been a born pettifogger, loving legal labyrinths for their own sake. Terence, skeptical, a bit sharp, would look for the simplest way to pass through a labyrinth and come out on the other side. Terence had served his apprenticeship in Norden's firm, re-entering it after his discharge from the Army. Until that graft-hunting appointment no one had heard much of him. Warner had gone to the office on Wilson Place off Main Street--"Lawyers' Hollow"--for a luncheon engagement with Joe Wheatley. Terence had been halted for a handshake, and Warner had fallen into a pose he could not always avoid: the aging lion. Terence wasn't scared. "Do you intend to be a famous prosecutor? Scourge of the unrighteous, huh?"