echanically fulfilling his
duties, his eyes blood-shot, his face worn and desperate. The fireman
Falutini bore Fairfax's rudeness with astonishing patience. Their run
was from nine until four, with a couple of hours lying off at Fonda, and
back again to Albany along in the night.

The fatality of what he had been doing appeared to Antony Fairfax in its
full magnitude. He had cut himself off from his class, from his kind for
ever. Bella Carew, baby though she was, exquisite, refined, brilliant,
what a woman she would be! At sixteen she would be a woman, at eighteen
any chap, who had the luck and the fortune, could marry her. She would
be the kind of woman that a man would climb for, achieve for, go mad
for. As far as he was concerned, he had made his choice. He was engaged
to be married to an Irish factory girl, and her words came back to him--

"If I'm any good, take me as I am. You couldn't marry the likes o' me."

Why had he ever been such a short-sighted Puritan, so little of a
worldling as to entangle himself in marriage? More terribly the sense of
his lost art had come in with the little figure he had admitted.

When he flung himself into his room Monday morning his brain was beyond
his usual control, it worked like magic, and one by one they passed
before him, the tauntingly beautiful aerial figures of his visions, the
angelic forms of his ideals, and if under his hands there had been any
tools he would have fallen upon them and upon the clay like a famished
man on bread. He threw himself down on his lonely bed in his room
through which magic had passed, and slept heavily until Mrs. Kenny
pounded on the door and roused him an hour before his train.

* * * * *

At Fonda, in the shed, he climbed stiffly from his cab, his head aching,
his eyes drunk with sleep. All there was of brute in him was rampant,
and anything that came in his way would have to bear the brunt of his
unbalanced spleen.

Falutini, a great bunch of rags in his hand, was at the side of the
engine, wiping the brass and softly humming. Fairfax heard it--

"Azuro puro,
Cielo azuro,
Mia Maddalena..."

"Stop that infernal bellow," he said, "will you?"

The Italian lifted himself upright and responded in his own tongue--

"I work, I slave, I endure. Now I may not sing? Macche," he cried
defiantly, "I will sing, I will."

He threw his chest out, his black eyes on Tony's cross blue ones. He
bu