e! It upset all the established order of things!

His anger of yesterday against Camilla had died out. She was not to
blame; she was a woman, and women were all alike. He had thought
differently before; that she was an exception; but now he knew better.
One and all they were mere puppets of emotion, and fickle.

In a measure, though, as he had excused Camilla he had incriminated
Ichabod. Ichabod was the guilty one, and a man. Ichabod had filched
from him his possession of most value; and without even the form of a
by-your-leave. The incident of last evening at the saloon (for he had
heard of it in the hour, as had every one in the little town) had but
served to make more implacable his resentment. By the satire of
circumstances it had come about that he again, Asa Arnold, had been
the cause of another's defending the honor of his own wife,--for she
was his wife as yet,--and that other, the defender, was Ichabod
Maurice!

The little man's face did not change at the thought. He only smoked
harder, until the room was blue; but though he did not put the feeling
in words even to himself, he knew in the depths of his own mind that
the price of that last day was death. Whether it was his own death, or
the death of Ichabod, he did not know; he did not care; but that one
of them must die was inevitable. Horrible as was the thought, it had
no terror for him, now. He wondered that it did not have; but, on the
contrary, it seemed to him very ordinary, even logical--as one orders
a dinner when he is hungry.

He lit another cigar, calmly. It was this very imperturbability of the
little man which made him terrible. Like a great movement of Nature,
it was awful from its very resistlessness; its imperviability to
appeal. Steadily, as he had lit the cigar, he smoked until the air
became bluer than before. In a ghastly way, he was trying to decide
whose death it should be,--as one decides a winter's flitting, whether
to Florida or California; only now the question was: should it be
suicide, or,--as in the saloon yesterday,--leave the decision to
Chance? For the time the personal equation was eliminated; the man
weighed the evidence as impartially as though he were deciding the
fate of another.

He sat long and very still; until even in the daylight the red
cigar-end grew redder in the haze. Without being conscious of the
fact, he was probably doing the most unselfish thinking of his life.
What the result of that thought would have b