. To wait for return, for such gifts, was to wait for the
unattainable.

She went through the open door that she saw open, perhaps not all
unwillingly; and she was not alone, for the child went with her, and
they came to Fairfax and told him that she had gone through gently
murmuring his name.

CHAPTER XXXIV

As Nut Street, with the destruction of his little statue, had been wiped
out of his history, so the two rooms overlooking the river and
steamboats knew Antony Fairfax no more. He turned the key in the door
the day they carried away the body of his wife, and when he came back
from the snowy earth and the snowy white city where he left her with his
hour-old child, he went to the Delavan House as he had done before, and
buried his head in his arms on his lowly bed in a hotel room and wept.

The following day he sent word to Rainsford to look out for another
engineer in his place. He had driven his last trip.

Tito Falutini wrung his friend's hand, and told Fairfax, in his broken
Italian-English, that he knew a fellow would take the rooms as they
stood. "Would Tony give the job to him?" Save for his clothes and
Molly's things, and they were few, he took nothing, not even the
drawings decorating the wall on which other Irish eyes should look with
admiration.

He interviewed the jewellers again. They gave him four hundred dollars
and took his mother's ring. He paid his doctor's bills and funeral
expenses, and had fifty dollars left until he should finish his
bas-relief. He went to live at the Canal Street studio and shut himself
up with his visions, his freedom, his strange reproach and his sense of
untrammelled wings.

He worked with impassioned fervour, for now he _knew_. He modelled with
assurance, for now he _saw_. His hands were so eager to create the idea
of his brain that he sighed as he worked, fairly panted at his task as
though he ran a race with inspiration. Half-fed, sometimes quite
sleepless, he lost weight and flesh. He missed the open-air life of the
engine and the air at his ears. But now at his ears were the audible
voices of his conceptions. February and March passed. His models were, a
mannequin, his studies of Molly Fairfax, and once the daughter of the
man who rented him the workshop stood before him draped in the long
garment; but he sent her away: she was too _living_ for his use. He ate
in little cheap restaurants down by the riverside, or cooked himself
coffee and eggs over his l