watched Mister Fairfax as every
Sunday he went limping up the street. Molly watched him, her breast
palpitating under the common shirtwaist, and the freckles on the milky
white skin died out under the red that rose.

"He's got a girl," she reflected; "sure, he's got a girl."

One Sunday in October, a day of yellow sunlight and autumn air, when Nut
Street and the yards and West Albany fringed the country like the hem of
an ugly garment, Molly came down and out into the street, and at a
distance she followed Fairfax. Fairfax cut down a couple of blocks
further on to the main station. He went in and bought a ticket for
Albany. He boarded the cars, and Molly followed.

She tracked him at a safe distance up Market Street to Eagle, and the
young man walked so slowly that it was easy to keep him in sight. The
man pursued by the Irish girl suggested nothing less than a New York
Central fireman. He looked like any other well-set-up, well-made young
gentleman out on a Sunday morning. In his fashionable coat, his
fashionable hat, Molly saw him go through the doors of a stone church
whose bells rang solemnly on the October air.

The girl was very much surprised.

She felt him safe even within the walls of the heathen church, and she
went directly back to Nut Street, her holiday hanging heavy on her
hands, and she went in and helped her patron wash the dishes, and
upstairs that night she stopped in her simple preparations for bed and
reddened.

"Sure, ain't I a silly! He's went to church to _meet_ his girl!"

Her morning's outing, the tramp and the excitement, were an unusual
strain to Molly, not to speak of her emotions, and she cried herself to
sleep.

Fairfax sat every Sunday in the same pew. The seat was to the left of
the altar, and he sang with an ardour and a mellowness that was lost
neither on the people near him nor on the choir-master. All arts were
sympathetic to him: his ear was good and his voice agreeable. His youth,
his sacrifice, his dying art he put into his church singing, and once
the choir-master, who had taken pains to mark him, stopped him in the
vestibule and spoke to him.

"No," Fairfax said, "I am not a musician. Don't know one note from
another, and can't learn. Only sing by ear, and not very sure at that!"

He listened indifferently. As the gentleman spoke of art and success,
over Antony's handsome mouth there flitted a smile that had something of
iron in it.

"I don't care for any of those