His welcome was so perfect, his manners so gracefully unforced, that Barrant had an uneasy suspicion that he was being beaten at his own game, and was slightly out of countenance in consequence.

Up to that moment he could not, for the life of him, decide whether Austin Turold's polished self-assurance was a mask or not.

It seemed too natural to be assumed.
"Your own opinion is that your brother committed suicide ?" he asked again.
"No other conclusion is possible, in my mind." "But did he have any reason, that you know of, to commit suicide ?" Austin shrugged his shoulders.

"Suicide is not usually associated with reason," he observed.

"But in Robert's case there is a reason, or so it seems to me.