before it so long, his face
grave and his eyes absorbed, that when Molly sighed, he started. Along
the base ran the words--

"_Why seek ye the living among the dead?_"

"Come," he said brusquely to his companion; "come. This is no place for
us." And he hurried her out of the grounds.

On the way home his silence was not flattering to his companion, who was
too meek to be offended. Already the pleasure of being by his side was
well-nigh too much for her swelling heart to bear. The lengthening
twilight filled Nut Street as they turned into it, and very nearly every
member of the little working colony was out of doors, including the
Sheedys and the new tenants of Sanders' old room. Walking alongside of
Molly Shannon, Fairfax understood what his promenade would mean. He
glanced at his companion and saw her colour, and she raised her head
with a dignity that touched him, and as they passed the Sheedys he said
"Good-evening" in his pleasant Southern voice, lifting his hat as though
they had been of his own kind. He drew the Irish girl's arm within his
own.

For Molly, she walked a gamut of misery, and the sudden realization of
the solemnity of the thing he was doing made the young man's heart beat
heavily.

CHAPTER XIV

He had been gone from home more than a year, his mother wrote. "One
cannot expect to carve a career in twelve months' time, Tony, and yet I
am so impatient for you, my darling, I am certain you have gone far and
have splendid things to show me. Are you sure that Albany is the place
for you? Would it not have been better to have stayed on with
Cedersholm? When will you run down to your old mother, dearest? I long
for the sound of your footstep, the dear broken footstep, Tony...." Then
she went on to say not to mind her foolishness, not to think of her as
mourning, but to continue with his beautiful things. She had not been
very well of late--a touch of fever, she reckoned: Emmeline took the
best of care of her. She was better.

He let the pages fall, reading them hastily, eagerly, approaching in his
thought of her everything he had longed to be, had yearned to be, might
have been, and the letter with its elegant fine writing and the
fluttering thin sheets rustled ghost-like in his hand. As he turned the
pages a leaf of jasmine she had put between the sheets fell unseen to
the floor.

He would go to New Orleans at once: he would throw himself at his
mother's knees and tell her his failures, hi