Tito was acquainted with the Italian quarter, he would find some one who baked in terra-cotta. They had brought their trades with them. Tony could do others: a Savoyard with a hand-organ, those things were very gentile, very brave indeed, and money, said Tito, gloating, money,--why that would cost a dollar at least. Fairfax covered up the clay and pushed the stool back in its corner. "You can make a fool of yourself, too," he said good-humouredly, and pushed Falutini out. "Go home and dream of Kenny's daughter Cora, and don't forget to buy a can of crude oil and order a half dozen of those cock-screws. Good-night." He banged the door. He undressed, still softly whistling, unpinned the curtain from the window, and what there was of heat and freshness came into the room with the mosquitoes that had huddled at the glass and the sill. He had heard Cora Kenny's information: Molly had lost her place because she would not do what the boss wanted. They always wanted one thing in the collar factories. The boss was a beast. He heaved a deep sigh. He had not been lonely the last fortnight, his work had absorbed him. There was no way for him to go on with it, he had no time, nor means. It had brought him near to his people, to his mother, to his kinsmen, to the child who had died, to the one that remained. But he knew his loneliness would return, his need of companionship, of expression and life, and he was too healthy, too strong to be nourished by his sentimental thought of the child-woman or to live on the sale of terra-cotta statues. He cradled his young head with its fair hair on his arm and fell asleep, and over the yards the harvest moon rose yellow and shone through the small window and on Antony. He might have been a boy asleep at school, his face looked so young and so unstained, and the same light shone on the angel of the resurrection at the gate of the rural cemetery, on Gardiner's little grave in Woodlawn, and on his mother's grave in New Orleans, where the brick walls keep the coffins high above the Mississippi's tide and silt. The moonlight could not penetrate to the corner where, under the damp cloths, Bella wept over the blackbird pressed against her cheek. CHAPTER XXII Fairfax expected to find a melancholy, wet-eyed little creature with a hard-luck story when he went to Troy, and although he knew that Molly would never reproach him, he knew as well that he had treated her very badly. From the day he had asked her to become Mrs. Antony Fairfax, and heard Cora Kenny's news, he had not been near his sweetheart. His sweetheart! Since he had read "The Idylls of the King" in his boyhood, no woman had seemed too high or too fine for him: he had been Lancelot to Guinevere, the Knight to the Lady: Molly Shannon had not been in any romance he had ever read.