"You do me too much honor to ask my opinion. But since you wish to know what I think, I consider it only justice to say that it would be easier for an unprejudiced mind to believe that Mr. Barrows had a secret enemy, or that his death was owing to some peculiar and perhaps unexplainable accident, than that he should seek it himself, having, as he did, every reason for living." "He was very happy, then?" murmured my companion, looking for an instant away, as if he could not bear the intensity of my gaze. "He loved deeply a noble woman; they were to have been married in a month; does that look like happiness?" I asked. The roving eye came back, fixed itself upon me, and turned dangerously dark and deep. "It _looks_ like it," he emphasized, and a strange smile passed over his lips, the utter melancholy of which was all that was plain to me. "And it _was_!" I persisted, determined not to yield an iota of my convictions to the persuasiveness of this man. "The woman who knew him best declared it to be so as she was dying; and I am forced to trust in her judgment, whatever the opinion of others may be." "But happy men----" he began. "Sometimes meet with accidents," I completed. "And your credulity is sufficient to allow you to consider Mr. Barrows' death as the result of accident?" Lightly as the question was put, I felt that nothing but a deep anxiety had prompted it, else why that earnest gaze from which my own could not falter, or that white line showing about the lip he essayed in vain to steady? Recoiling inwardly, though I scarcely knew why, I forced myself to answer with the calmness of an inquisitor: "My credulity is not sufficient for me to commit myself to that belief. If investigation should show that Mr. Barrows had an enemy----" "Mr. Barrows had no enemy!" flashed from Mr. Pollard's lips. "I mean," he explained, with instant composure, "that he was not a man to awaken jealousy or antagonism; that, according to all accounts, he had the blessing, and not the cursing, of each man in the community." "Yes," I essayed. "He never came to his death through the instrumentality of another person," broke in Mr. Pollard, with a stern insistence. "He fell into the vat intentionally or unintentionally, but no man put him there. Do you believe me, Miss Sterling?"