o boot, he ought to be gentlemanly enough not to
play the dog in the manger. No, it isn't that. I will admit that he is
well enough in his way, provided that way is out of mine. The difficulty
is that he doesn't seem to keep out of hers. Major premiss,
then--Eden-hates Usselex. Minor premiss--Usselex keeps her from me.
Ergo. Eliminate Usselex, and she is mine. The logic of that is
admirable; the only fault with it is that it doesn't give a hint as to
the manner in which Usselex is to be eliminated. He may eliminate
himself, it is true; but that is a possibility that it is hardly worth
while to count on. And, meanwhile, I know Eden well enough to be aware
that until he does she will decline to listen to me."

Maule had reached the upper part of the Avenue. The night was chill and
clear as our December nights are apt to be. There was a foretaste of
snow in the air, and in that foretaste a tonic. And suddenly the
cathedral loomed, huge, yet unsteepled, as though the designers had lost
heart in its carcass and faith as well. The sky seemed remote and
unneighborly. In the background the moon glinted in derision, and
directly overhead was a splatter of callous stars.

The scene did not divert the channel of his thoughts. He walked steadily
on, leaving behind him the dogma that time had fossilized and man had
forgot. He was indifferent to creeds. The apathy of the stars told him
nothing of worlds to which our own is unknown. In the derision of the
moon he did not see the sneer of a sphere that is dead. The foretaste of
snow in the air brought him no memory of the summer that had gone, and
when he reached the park the leafless trees that spring would regarment
left him unimpressed. The identity of birth and death, the aimlessness
of all we undertake, were matters to which he had never given a thought.
And had the beggar who presently accosted him been a thinker capable of
explaining that life is an exhalation, that we respire, aspire, and
expire, unconscious as is the tree of the futility of it all, Dugald
Maule would have dismissed him with the same indifferent shrug. He was
instinct with aims that end with self. His mind was centered on Eden,
and until he solved the problem she had suggested, he had no thought of
time that life devours or of time that devours life.

And as he tried to devise some form of campaign, suddenly he was visited
by an idea which he grasped and detained. It was, that if Eden hated her
husband a caus