airfax paused.

"Irish, I expect? Your name, Fairfax, is Irish. I understand you've had
a hard blow this year, been sick and lost your mother."

At the quiet statement of this sacred fact Fairfax started painfully,
his face flushed.

"He would not have spoken to me like that," he thought, "if he had not
imagined me a working man."

"Work is the best friend a young man can have," Rainsford went on; "it
is a great safeguard. I take it that you are about thirty?"

"Twenty-three," said Fairfax, shortly.

His report was brief. Just then his fireman came in, a black-haired,
tall young fellow with whom Fairfax knew he should never sing "Mia
Maddelena."

CHAPTER XVII

He avoided Rainsford, gave himself up to his engine and his train, and
took a dislike to his black-headed fireman, who dared to be Italian and
to recall the aurora of days he had buried fathoms deep. The heat
pouring on him in summer time made him suffer physically. He rather
welcomed the discomfort; his skin grew hardened and tanned and oiled and
grimed, and his whole body strong and supple; and his devotion to his
work, the air that filled him as he flew, made him the perfect, splendid
animal that he was.

At night, when the darkness blotted out the steel rails, and the breeze
blowing through the car-window fluttered his sleeve till it bellied, and
the cinders, red and biting, whirled by, and on either side the country
lay dark and fragrant with its summery wealth--at night his eyes, fixed
on the track under the searchlight, showed him more than once a way to
end his unhappy life, but his confused reveries and his battle,
spiritual and physical, helped him, and he came out of it with a love
for life and a stronger hold upon it each time than the last. He gave up
wearing his Sunday clothes, he went as the others did; he had not been
for months to Albany or to Troy.

One Sunday in midsummer his local did not run on the seventh day. He
considered his own image in the glass over his bureau and communed with
his reflection. The result of his musings was that he opened his trunk
and took out the precious packet; started to unfold it, turned it over
in his uncertain hands, thrust it back, set his teeth and went out to
the junction and took the train for Troy.

He found her in the boarding-house where she was passing her Sunday,
rocking the landlady's teething baby. He bade her to come as she was,
not to fix up. The idea of a toilet which would end