To that query, which came involuntarily, he answered with a doubt.
"I'm fighting my conviction," he said, almost plaintively, "instead of giving myself up to its free course. I can't expect to be helped as long as I do that; but I can't, I won't believe. A man in my mood can't solve anything!"
So it came to pass that the night brought him no help, and he rose in the morning without that sense of rest which a single hour's sleep brings under the stimulus of success.
About noon, a country lad on horseback brought a message from a point some six miles below the village. Obeying the message, he started at once with the coroner and physician.
On a tiny meadow that lay as a crescent of green along the border of cove where the current of the river sweeps in as an eddy, something was drawn up from the water and lay covered in an unrecognizable mass, which none the less had a strange repulsiveness about it. Back of the meadow great trees rose toward the early June sky; before it the river flashed in the June sunshine, and across its
