m, 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.

"He saw I'd taken to Oliver--that's why he's anxious to spite him," she
thought resentfully as she stared with unseeing eyes out into the gray
twilight. "It's all just to worry me, that's why he is doing it. He
knows I couldn't be any fonder of the boy if he had come of my own
blood." And she who had been a Bolingbroke set her thin lips together
with the only consciousness of superiority to her husband that she had
ever known--the secret consciousness that she was better born. Out of
the wreck of her entire life, this was the floating spar to which she
s