"But the boy's heart is bound up in his ambition," urged Belinda, with an energy he had witnessed in her only once before in her life, and that was on the occasion of her historic defence of the seamstress. For a moment Cyrus stared at her with attention, almost with curiosity. Then he opened his lips for a crushing rejoinder, but thinking better of his impulse, merely repeated dryly, "His heart?" before he turned toward the door. On the threshold he looked back and added, "The next time you see him, tell him I'd like a word with him." Left alone in her room, Mrs. Treadwell sat down in a rocking-chair by the window, and clasped her hands tightly in her lap with a nervous gesture which she had acquired in long periods of silent waiting on destiny. Her mental attitude, which was one of secret, and usually passive, antagonism to her husband, had stamped its likeness so indelibly upon her features, that, sitting there in the wan light, she resembled a woman who suffers from the effects of some slow yet deadly sickness. Lacking the courage to put her revolt into words, she had allowed it to turn inward and embitter the hidden sources of her being. In the beginning she had asked so little of life that the denial of that little by Fate had appeared niggardly rather than tragic. A man--any man who would have lent himself gracefully as an object of worship--would have been sufficient material for the building of her happiness. Marriage, indeed, had always appeared to her so desirable as an end in itself, entirely apart from the personal peculiarities or possibilities of a husband, that she had awakened almost with surprise one morning to the knowledge that she was miserable. It was not so much that her romance had met with open disaster as that it had simply faded away. This gradual fading away of sentiment, which she had accepted at the time as only one of the inevitable stages in the slow process of emotional adjustment, would perhaps have made but a passing impression on a soul to whom every other outlet into the world had not been closed by either temperament or tradition. But love had been the one window through which light could enter her house of Life; and when this darkened, her whole nature had sickened and grown morbid. Then at last all the corroding bitterness in her heart had gathered to a canker which ached ceaselessly, like a physical sore, in her breast.