He talked to her as they strolled, realizing his need of companionship,
and his pent-up heart poured itself forth as they walked between the
graves, and he told the Irish girl of Bella and little Gardiner, and of
his grief.

"I don't know what I did that day," he finished. "I was a brute to my
aunt and to the little girl. I laid him down on his bed and rushed out
like a crazy man; the house seemed to haunt me. I must have been ill
then. I recall that my aunt called to me and that Bella hung on my arm
and that I shook her off. I recall that my uncle followed me downstairs
and stood by me while I got into my overcoat, but I was too savage and
too miserably proud to answer him. I left him talking to me and the
little girl crying on the stairs."

She asked him timidly, "What had they done to make you hate them so?"
She told herself in her humility that he was a gentleman and not for
her.

He continued, carried away by the fact of a good listener, and, although
she listened, she understood less than Benvenuto Cellini, less, even,
than the children. He came up against so many things that were
impossible to tell her that he stopped at length, laughing.

"You see how a chap runs on when he has a friend by him, Miss Molly. Why
do you go back to the collar factory?"

He stopped short, remembering what Sanders had said, and that Nut Street
had shut its doors against her. They had come down through the cemetery
to the main avenue that stretched, spacious and broad, between the
dwellings of the dead. They sauntered slowly side by side, an
incongruous, appealing couple. He saw her worn shoes, the poor skirt,
the hands discoloured as were his, through toil, and his glance
followed up the line of her form and his artistic sense told him that it
was lovely. Under her coarse bodice the breast gently swelled with her
breath, her eyes were downcast, and there was an appealing charm about
her that a young man in need of love could not gainsay. Pity for her had
been growing long in Fairfax--since the first day he saw her in the
coffee house, since the time when he had decided to go elsewhere for his
meals.

She stopped at the foot of the avenue and said something was beautiful,
and he looked up. The marble figure of an angel on a grey pedestal rose
at the gate, a colossal figure in snowy marble, with folded wings and
one uplifted hand. There was a solemn majesty in the creation, a fine,
noble, holy majesty, and the sculptor halted