o the room with
the mosquitoes that had huddled at the glass and the sill. He had heard
Cora Kenny's information: Molly had lost her place because she would not
do what the boss wanted. They always wanted one thing in the collar
factories. The boss was a beast. He heaved a deep sigh. He had not been
lonely the last fortnight, his work had absorbed him. There was no way
for him to go on with it, he had no time, nor means. It had brought him
near to his people, to his mother, to his kinsmen, to the child who had
died, to the one that remained. But he knew his loneliness would return,
his need of companionship, of expression and life, and he was too
healthy, too strong to be nourished by his sentimental thought of the
child-woman or to live on the sale of terra-cotta statues. He cradled
his young head with its fair hair on his arm and fell asleep, and over
the yards the harvest moon rose yellow and shone through the small
window and on Antony. He might have been a boy asleep at school, his
face looked so young and so unstained, and the same light shone on the
angel of the resurrection at the gate of the rural cemetery, on
Gardiner's little grave in Woodlawn, and on his mother's grave in New
Orleans, where the brick walls keep the coffins high above the
Mississippi's tide and silt.

The moonlight could not penetrate to the corner where, under the damp
cloths, Bella wept over the blackbird pressed against her cheek.

CHAPTER XXII

Fairfax expected to find a melancholy, wet-eyed little creature with a
hard-luck story when he went to Troy, and although he knew that Molly
would never reproach him, he knew as well that he had treated her very
badly. From the day he had asked her to become Mrs. Antony Fairfax, and
heard Cora Kenny's news, he had not been near his sweetheart. His
sweetheart! Since he had read "The Idylls of the King" in his boyhood,
no woman had seemed too high or too fine for him: he had been Lancelot
to Guinevere, the Knight to the Lady: Molly Shannon had not been in any
romance he had ever read.

He found her sitting among her lodging-house keeper's children in a room
tidied by her own hands. During her leisure, she had made herself a pink
gingham dress with small white rosebuds on it, and around her neck a low
white collar she had pinned with a tortoise-shell brooch. Her dress was
the simplest Fairfax had ever seen her wear. It was cool and plain, and
the Irish girl's milk-white skin, her auburn ha