"Irish, I expect? Your name, Fairfax, is Irish. I understand you've had a hard blow this year, been sick and lost your mother." At the quiet statement of this sacred fact Fairfax started painfully, his face flushed. "He would not have spoken to me like that," he thought, "if he had not imagined me a working man." "Work is the best friend a young man can have," Rainsford went on; "it is a great safeguard. I take it that you are about thirty?" "Twenty-three," said Fairfax, shortly. His report was brief. Just then his fireman came in, a black-haired, tall young fellow with whom Fairfax knew he should never sing "Mia Maddelena." CHAPTER XVII He avoided Rainsford, gave himself up to his engine and his train, and took a dislike to his black-headed fireman, who dared to be Italian and to recall the aurora of days he had buried fathoms deep. The heat pouring on him in summer time made him suffer physically. He rather welcomed the discomfort; his skin grew hardened and tanned and oiled and grimed, and his whole body strong and supple; and his devotion to his work, the air that filled him as he flew, made him the perfect, splendid animal that he was. At night, when the darkness blotted out the steel rails, and the breeze blowing through the car-window fluttered his sleeve till it bellied, and the cinders, red and biting, whirled by, and on either side the country lay dark and fragrant with its summery wealth--at night his eyes, fixed on the track under the searchlight, showed him more than once a way to end his unhappy life, but his confused reveries and his battle, spiritual and physical, helped him, and he came out of it with a love for life and a stronger hold upon it each time than the last. He gave up wearing his Sunday clothes, he went as the others did; he had not been for months to Albany or to Troy. One Sunday in midsummer his local did not run on the seventh day. He considered his own image in the glass over his bureau and communed with his reflection. The result of his musings was that he opened his trunk and took out the precious packet; started to unfold it, turned it over in his uncertain hands, thrust it back, set his teeth and went out to the junction and took the train for Troy. He found her in the boarding-house where she was passing her Sunday, rocking the landlady's teething baby. He bade her to come as she was, not to fix up. The idea of a toilet which would end 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."