And yet faith in ends and purposes was health, and doubt of them disease. The one we must have, the other we must be rid of.
So ran Aidee's thoughts while he stood at the window and looked out gloomily at Seton Avenue, at its block pavement, and the shadows thrown by the pale young maple leaves. He saw nothing coming but a street car, a headlong rattling mechanism. He thought how all over Port Argent people were talking of the Wood murder—some gabbling about it like Mrs. Tillotson's guests, others saying, decently enough: “Wood always treated me right,” or, “Well, the old scamp's gone!”
The Wood murder seemed an abrupt and challenging event thrust across his life—harsh, discordant, repellent, like that clanging mechanism in the street, which stopped, however, almost before Mrs. Tillotson's door, and Camilla Champney stepped down from it. Aidee watched her enter the house, and then fell to pacing the floor restlessly. After half an hour he took his hat and went across the street to the Tillotson drawing-room.
CHAPTER VII—THE THIRD LAMP
WHILE Aidee was looking gloomily from his study window on Seton Avenue, the Tillotson coterie were discussing the Wood murder.
“Splendid subject for a poem, Mrs. Tillotson!” cried Ralbeck. “I will put it in music, the schema thus—The wronged cry for justice! They rise! Staccato! Spare not! Fortissimo! Triumph! Victory! Allegro-mezzoforte!”
And Berry rumpled his hair and murmured: “Peace and coffee at Mrs. Tillotson's afterwards. Andante. It's rather nice.”
And Mrs. Tillotson poured coffee from her patent coffee-pot, saying sternly that Mr. Aidee never countenanced crime; she could not bring herself either to countenance crime.