ou ain't used to him," observed
Miss Willy, with a bashful giggle. She was a diminutive, sparrow-like
creature, with a natural taste for sick-rooms and death-beds, and an
inexhaustible fund of gossip. As Mrs. Treadwell, for once, did not
respond to her unspoken invitation to chat, she tied her bonnet strings
under her sharp little chin, and taking up her satchel went out again,
after repeating several times that she would be "back the very minute
Mrs. Pendleton was through with her." A few minutes later, Belinda,
still seated by the window, saw the shrunken figure ascend the area
steps and cross the dusty street with a rapid and buoyant step, as
though she, also, plain, overworked and penniless, was feeling the
delicious restlessness of the spring in her blood. "I wonder what on
earth she's got to make her skip like that," thought Belinda not without
bitterness. "I reckon she thinks she's just as important as anybody,"
she added after an instant, touching, though she was unaware of it, the
profoundest truth of philosophy. "She's got nothing in the world but
herself, yet I reckon to her that is everything, even if it doesn't make
a particle of difference to anybody else whether she is living or dead."

Her eyes were still on Miss Willy, who stepped on briskly, swinging her
bag joyously before her, when the sound of Cyrus's voice, raised high in
anger, came up to her from the library. A short silence followed; then a
door opened and shut quickly, and rapid footsteps passed up the
staircase and along the hall outside of her room. While she waited,
overcome by the nervous indecision which attacked her like palsy
whenever she was forced to take a definite action, Susan ran up the
stairs and called her name in a startled and shaking voice.

"Oh, mother, father has quarrelled dreadfully with Oliver and ordered
him out of the house!"

CHAPTER V

OLIVER, THE ROMANTIC

An hour later Oliver stood before the book-shelves in his room, wrapping
each separate volume in newspapers. Downstairs in the basement, he knew,
the family were at supper, but he had vowed, in his splendid scorn of
material things, that he would never eat another morsel under Cyrus's
roof. Even when his aunt, trembling in every limb, had brought him
secretly from the kitchen a cup of coffee and a plate of waffles, he had
refused to unlock his door and permit her to enter. "I'll come out when
I am ready to leave," he had replied to her whispered entrea