t
your kind and you don't love her."

His hand whitened in its grip on the door handle, then giving one look
at his companion as though he meditated repeating his unfortunate attack
upon him, he flung himself out of the door, muttering--

"I've got to get out of here.... I don't dare to stay!"

CHAPTER XI

By the time the sublime spring days came, Fairfax discovered that he
needed consolation. He must have been a very stubborn, dull animal, he
decided, to have so successfully stuffed down and crushed out Antony
Fairfax. Antony Fairfax could not have been much of a man at any time to
have gone down so uncomplainingly in the fight.

"A chap who is uniquely an artist and poet," he wrote to his mother, "is
not a real man, I reckon."

But he had not described to her what kind of a fellow stood in his
stead. Instead of going to church on Sundays he exercised in the free
gymnasium, joined a base-ball team--the firemen against the
engineers--and read and studied more than he should have done whenever
he could keep his eyes open. Then spring came, and he could not deny
another moment, another day or another night, that he needed
consolation.

The wives and daughters of the railroad hands and officials--those he
saw in Nut Street--were not likely to charm his eyes. Fairfax waited for
Easter--waited with a strange young crying voice in his heart, a
threatening softness around his heart of steel.

He went on rapidly with his new studies; his mind grasped readily
whatever he attacked, and his teacher, less worldly than the choir-master
at St. Angel's, wondered at his quickness, and looked at his disfigured
hands. Joe Mead knew Tony's plans and his ambitions; by June they would
give Fairfax an engine and Mead would look out for another fireman to
feed "the Girl." The bulky, panting, puffing, sliding thing, feminine as
the machine seemed, could no longer charm Fairfax nor occupy all his
thoughts.

He had been sincere when he told Sanders that he would look out for
Molly Shannon. The pinnacle this decision lifted him to, whether felt to
be the truth or purely a sentimental advance, nevertheless gave him a
view which seemed to do him good. The night after Sanders' visit,
Fairfax slept in peace, and the next day he went over to Sanders' mother
and asked to see Molly Shannon. She had left Nut Street, had run away
without leaving any address. Fairfax did not push his chivalry to try to
find her. He slept better than eve