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?"

Did I believe him? Was he upon trial, then, and was he willing I
should see he understood it? No, no, that could not be; yet why
asseverate so emphatically a fact of which no man could be sure
unless he had been present at the scene of death, or at least known
more of the circumstances attending it than was compatible with the
perfect ignorance which all men professed to have of them. Did he
not see that such words were calculated to awaken suspicion, and
that it would be harder, after such a question, to believe he spoke
from simple conviction, than from a desire to lead captive the will
of a woman whose intuitions, his troubled conscience told him, were
to be feared? Rising, as an intimation that the conversation was