in a horrible frock
rasped his nerves. She detected a great change in him, simple-minded
though she was, and she tried to get him to talk and failed. Down at the
Erie Canal, by the moored boats and the motionless water, he seized her
arm and facing her, said, his lips working--

"I have come to ask you to marry me, Molly."

She grew as white as the drying linen on the windless air, as the family
wash hung on the canal boat lines behind her. Her grey eyes opened wide
on Antony.

"I'm making a good living: too much for me alone."

He saw her try to find her voice and her senses, and with something of
his old radiance, he said--

"I'm a brute. I reckon I don't know how to make love. I've startled
you."

"Ah, shure, ye don't know what ye're saying," she whispered; "the likes
o' me ain't good enough."

"Hush, hush," he answered, "don't say foolish things."

She gasped and shook her head. "Ye shouldn't tempt me so. It's crool. Ye
shouldn't tempt me so."

With a self-abandonment and a humility which he never afterward forgot,
as her life and colour came back Molly said under her breath--

"Take me as I am, shure, if I'm the least bit of good to ye. I love ye
enough for both."

He exclaimed and kissed her.

Dreams of women! Visions of the ecstasy of first love, ideals and
aspirations, palpitating, holy, the young man's impassioned dream of The
Woman, the Only Woman, the notion and conception that the man of nature
and of talent and of keen imagination sleeps upon and follows and seeks
and seeks and follows all his life, from boyhood to the grave--where
were they then?

He had brushed his aunt's cheek, he had touched her hand and trembled;
now he kissed fresh young lips that had yearned for his, and he gave his
first embrace to woman, put his arms round Molly Shannon and her young
body filled them. As she had said, she had love enough for both. He felt
a great gratitude to her, a relaxation of his tense senses, a melting of
his heart, and his tenderness was deep for her when his next kiss met
her tears.

CHAPTER XVIII

He returned to Nut Street dazed, excited but less sentimentally
miserable and more profoundly touched. He had made himself a mechanical
career; he had assumed the responsibilities of a man. He might have been
a miserable failure as a sculptor, perhaps he would be a good mechanic.
Who knows where any flight will carry a man? Making his life, married
and founding a home, he would be a f