in his
authority and forbid the dressmaker the house; but, in doing so, he had
reckoned without the strength which may lie in an unscrupulous weakness.
Belinda, who had never fought for anything else in her life, refused
absolutely to give up her dressmaker. "If I can't see her here, I'll go
to her house," she had said, and Cyrus had yielded at last as the bully
always yields before the frenzied violence of his victim.

After a hasty touch to the four round flat curls on her forehead, Mrs.
Treadwell turned from the bureau with her habitually hopeless air, and
slipped her thin arms into the tight sleeves of a black silk basque
which she took up from the bed.

"Did you see Oliver when you came in?" she asked. "He was in here
looking for you a few minutes ago."

"No, I didn't see him, but I'm going to. He's got to give up this
highfaluting nonsense of his if he expects me to support him. There's
one thing the fellow's got to understand, and that is that he can choose
between his precious stuff and his bread and meat. Before I give him a
job, he'll have to let me see that he is done with all this business of
play-writing."

A frightened look came into his wife's face, and indifferently glancing
at her as he finished, he was arrested by something enigmatical and yet
familiar in her features. A dim vision of the way she had looked at him
in the early days of their marriage floated an instant before him.

"Do you think he wants to do that?" she asked, with a little sound as if
she had drawn her breath so sharply that it whistled. What in thunder
was the matter with the woman? he wondered irritably. Of course she was
a fool about the scamp--all the women, even Susan, lost their heads over
him--but, after all, why should it make any difference to her whether he
wrote plays or took freight orders, as long as he managed to feed
himself?

"Well, I don't reckon it has come to a question of what he wants," he
rejoined shortly.

"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 hi