amp, and wondered who would be the first to
break the silence and isolation, for it was six weeks before he saw a
single human being save those he passed in the street.

"Rainsford," he said to the agent, who on the last day of March came
slowly in at noon, walking like a man just out of a long illness, "I
reckoned you'd be along when you were ready. I've waited for you here."

Fairfax's hand was listlessly touched by his friend's, then Rainsford
went over and took Molly's place by the lamp. Fairfax checked the words,
"Not _there_, for God's sake, Rainsford!" He thought, "Let the living
come. Nothing can brush away the image of her sitting there in the
lamplight, no matter how many fill the place."

Rainsford's eyes were hollow, and his tone as pale as his face, whose
sunken cheeks and hollows, to Fairfax, marked the progress of a fatal
disease. His voice sounded hoarse and strained; he spoke with effort.

"I've come to say good-bye. I've given up my job here in West Albany.
I'm going to try another country, Tony."

The sculptor sat down on the lounge where he had used to sit near his
wife, and said solicitously--

"I see you're not well, old man. I don't wonder you're going to try a
better climate. I hope to heaven I shall never see another snow-flake
fall. I assure you I feel them fall on graves."

There was a moment's silence. The agent passed his hand across his face
and said, as if reluctant to speak at all--

"Yes, I am going to try another country." He glanced at Fairfax and
coughed.

"California?" questioned Antony. "I hope you'll get a job in some such
paradise. Do you think you will?"

The other man did not reply. He looked about the studio, now living-room
and workshop, and said--

"I should like to see what you have been doing, Fairfax. How are you
getting on?"

Tony, however, did not rise from the sofa nor show any inclination to
comply, and his friend irrelevantly, as though he took up the young
man's problems where he had left them, before his own sentiment for
Molly had estranged him from her husband--

"You must be pretty hard up by now, Tony." He drew from his waistcoat
pocket his wallet, and took out a roll of bills which he folded
mechanically and held in his transparent hand. "Ever since the day you
came in to take your orders from me in West Albany, I've wanted to help
you. Now I've got the money to do so, old man."

"No, my kind friend."

"Don't refuse me then, if I am that." Th