sen to talk with her and make her his companion. But he was reserved,
mentally and spiritually, and he kept the depths of himself down, nor
could he reveal his soul which from boyhood he had dreamed to give to
One Woman with his whole being. He felt himself condemned to silence and
only partially to develop, and no one but Molly Fairfax, with her
humility and her admiration, could have kept him from unholy dreams and
unfaithfulness.

His life on the engine was hard in the winter. He felt the cold
intensely, and as his art steadily advanced, his daily labour in the
yards grew hateful, and he pushed the days of the week through till
Sunday should come and he be free. His face was set and white when
Rainsford informed him that it would be impossible to give him
"Saturdays off" any longer. Antony turned on his heel and left the
office without response to his chief, and thought as he strode back to
his tenement: "It's Peter's personal feeling. He's in love with Molly,
and those days in the studio gall him."

Molly, who was lying down when he came in, brushed her hand across her
eyes as if to brush away whatever was there before he came. She took his
hat and coat; his slippers and warm jacket were before the stove.

"Rainsford has knocked me off my Saturdays," he said bitterly.

She stopped at the hook, the things in her hand. "That's hard on you,
Tony, and you getting on so well with your work."

She didn't say that she could not have gone on any more ... that the
walk she took the week before to Canal Street had been her last; but
Fairfax, observing her, rendered keen by his own disappointment,
understood. He called her to him, made her sit down on the sofa beside
him.

"Peter has been better to you than I have," he said sadly. "I've tired
you out, my dear, and I've been a selfish brute to you."

He saw that his words gave her pain, and desisted. He was going to be
nothing more from henceforth but an engineer. He would shut the studio
and take her out on Sundays. She received his decision meekly, without
rebuffing it, and he said--

"Molly, if I had not come along, I reckon you would have married Peter
Rainsford. There! Don't look like that!"

"Tony," she replied, "I'd rather be wretched with you--if I were, and
I'm not, dear. I'd rather be unhappy along of you than the happiest
queen."

He kissed her hand with a gallantry new to her and which made her
crimson, and half laugh and half cry.

She went early to b