Some wound up their worldly affairs with businesslike precision before embarking on their timeless voyage, others jumped into the black gulf without, apparently, any premeditated intention, as if at the beckoning summons of some grisly invisible hand which they dared not disobey.  Barrant recalled the strange case of a wealthy merchant who had cut his throat on a Bank holiday and confessed before death that he had felt the same impulse on that day for years past.  He had whispered that the day marked to him such a pause in life’s dull round that it seemed to him a pity to start again.  He had resisted the impulse for years, but it had waxed stronger with each recurring anniversary, and had overcome him at last.

Every suicide was a law unto himself.  Barrant willingly conceded that, but he could not so easily concede that a man like Robert Turold would put an end to his life just when he was about to attain the summit of that life’s ambition.  It was a Schopenhauerian doctrine that all men had suicidal tendencies in them, in the sense that every man wished at times for the cessation of the purposeless energy called life, and it was only the violence of the actual act which prevented its more frequent commission.  But Barrant reflected that in his experience suicides were generally people who had been broken by life or were bored with it.  Men of action or intellect rarely committed suicide, not because they valued life highly, but because they had so much to do in their brief span that they hadn’t time to think about putting an end to it.  Death usually overtook them in the midst of their schemes.

Robert Turold was not a man of intellect or action, but he belonged to a type which, as a rule, cling to life:  the type from which zealots and bigots spring—­men with a single idea.  Such men shrink from the idea of destroying the vital engine by which their idea is driven forward.  Their ego is too pronounced for that.

It was true that Robert Turold believed he had realized the aim for which he had lived, and therefore, in a sense, had nothing more to live for.  But that point of view was too coldly logical for human nature.  Its presumption was only applicable to a higher order of beings.  No man had ever committed suicide upon achieving the summit of an ambition.  There were always fresh vistas opening before the human mind.

Barrant left the study for the opposite room where the body of Robert Turold had been taken.  It was his bedroom, and he had been laid upon the bed.

Death had not come to him easily.  His harsh features were set in a stern upward frown, and the lower lip was slightly caught between the teeth, as though bitten in the final rending of the spirit.  But Barrant had seen too much of violent death to be repelled by any death mask, however repellent.

He eyed the corpse closely, and then proceeded to examine the death wound.  In doing so he had to move the body, and a portion of the sleeve fell back, exposing the left arm to the elbow.  Barrant was about to replace it when his eye lighted upon a livid mark on the arm.  He rolled back the garment until the arm lay bare to the shoulder.  The disclosure revealed four faint livid marks running parallel across the arm, just above the elbow.