did not
untie; he did not wish to open his wound. And his face, thinner from his
illness and his loss, looked ten years older. The early happy ecstasy of
youth was gone, and a bitter, mature recklessness took its place, and
there was no hand to soothe him but Molly's, and she had gone back to
Troy. He tried what ways were open to a man of his age and the class he
had adopted, and he turned for distraction and relief and consolation to
their doors. But at those portals, at the threshold of the houses where
other men went in, he stopped. If his angel had deserted him, at any
rate the beast had not taken its place. The vast solitude and the cruel
loneliness, the isolation from his kind, made him an outcast too
wretched not to cry for help and too clean to wallow in order to forget
his state. His work saved his health and his brain. He made a model of
an engine in plaster and went mad over it; he set it on a shelf in his
room and when in June he drove his own engine and was an engineer on the
New York Central, he knew his locomotive, body and soul and parts, as no
other mechanic in the Company knew it. His chiefs were conscious of his
skill and intelligence. There were jealousies and enmities, and instead
of driving the express as he had hoped, he was delegated to a local on a
branch line, with an Italian for fireman who could not speak a word of
any but his own language.

"You speak Italian, don't you, Fairfax?" his boss at the office asked
him.

("Cielo azuro ... Giornata splendida...!") and he smelt the wet clay.

"I can _point_," laughed the engineer, "in _any_ language! and I reckon
I'll get on with Falutini."

CHAPTER XVI

The boss was a Massachusetts man and new to Nut Street, and Fairfax,
when he took the paper with his orders from Rainsford's hand, saw for
the first time in months a man of his own class, sitting in the
revolving chair before the desk where his papers and schedules and
ledgers were filed. The man's clothes were too thin for the season, his
linen was old and his appearance meagre, and in his face with its sunken
cheeks, the drooping of the eyes and the thinness of the brow, were the
marks of the sea of life and its waste, and the scars of the storm. A
year ago Fairfax would have passed Rainsford by as a rather
pitiful-looking man of middle age.

The boss, his thin hand opening and shutting over a small book which
looked like a daily ledger, regarded the engineer in his red shirt as
F