Dr. Bilks was a popular man. He drank whiskey with the tap-room politicians; he talked slang with the fast young men; he breathed piety to the parsons, and gave twenty dollars for foreign missions; he ate the best of suppers at the Bell River House with the lawyers, sea captains, and mill agents; and as a physician, he made old women of both sexes believe they were dying, and then miraculously gave them a new lease of life. He talked and laughed with all men and all women, and compelled even the cavillers to be his friends. He planted an old woman’s corn and potatoes for her with his own hands, and somehow everybody in the place found out what a kind act he had done within twenty-four hours. He carried nice things to the sick rooms of the poor whenever there was a possibility of the fact being known. People did not wish to believe anything ill of such a man; and not wishing to do so, it would have been hard to convince them that the doctor was not a first-class angel. On the other hand, Dick Birch was rather brusque in his manner. He never went out of his way to make a friend of any man. When he did good deeds, he did them in silence and darkness. If he liked a man, he manifested it; if he did not like him, he did not “toady” to him because he was one of the selectmen, the owner of a factory, or a member of Congress. Dick, therefore, was not a popular man, in the sense that Dr. Bilks had earned this distinction. He was a straightforward, blunt man; but being a gentleman by nature as well as by education, he treated all men with courtesy, and therefore he was not unpopular. The people were more willing to believe that Dick Birch was a scoundrel than that the doctor even told a falsehood, to say nothing of the crime of perjury. Against such odds it was not easy to contend. Dick did not purpose to contend any longer at present in Poppleton; but he meant to inquire into the doctor’s antecedents. He wished to know whether the popular physician had always been what he appeared to be now. He had been intimate with Dr. Bilks for several months, and he had sufficient material upon which to base his investigations. He intended to follow the doctor from college down to his arrival at Poppleton. Dick believed that Dr. Bilks had a purpose, though its nature was not readily fathomed. Why did the doctor labor so hard to prove that he, Dick, was with Buckstone on the night of the murder? Was it to conceal his own agency in the affair? Was it to bring him into bad repute with Hungerford, and thus drive him from Pine Hill, and from Julia, that he might woo and wed her himself? Dick would have been satisfied with this last suggestion if it had not involved a greater difficulty. Why was Dr. Bilks persuading Buckstone to marry Mary? In what manner did it concern him? Had all these events, including the murder, been contrived by him to accomplish the one purpose of winning the hand of Julia?