There was a divine fragrance in the air. Fairfax stopped to gather a few anemones and handed them to his silent companion.

"Since you have grown so pale in the collar factory, Miss Molly, you look like these flowers."

He stretched out his, arms, bared his head, flung it up and looked toward the woodland up the slope and saw the snow-white stones on the hill, above the box borders and the cedar borders of the burial place: above, the sky was blue as a bird's wing.

"Let me help you." He put his hand under her arm and walked with her up the hill. They breathed together; the sweet air with its blossomy scent touched their lips, and the ancient message of spring spoke to them. He was on Molly's left side; beneath his arm he could feel her fluttering heart and his own went fast. At the hill top they paused at the entrance to a pretentious lot, with high white shafts and imposing columns, broken by the crude whiteness of a single marble cross. Brightly it stood out against the air and the dark green of cedar and box.

"This is the most perfect monument," he said aloud, "the most harmonious; indeed, it is the only relief to the eye."

On every grave were Easter garlands, crosses and wreaths; the air was heavy with lilac and with lily.

Except for a few monosyllables Molly said nothing, but now, as they paused side by side, she murmured—

"It's beautiful quiet after the racket of the shops; it's like heaven!"

Fairfax's glance wandered over the acres of monuments, marking the marble city, and came back to the living girl at his side.

"It's a strange place for two young people to stroll about in, Miss Molly."

Molly Shannon stood meekly, her work-stained hands clasped loosely before her and in her form were the beauties of youth, virginity, chastity, promise of life and fecundity, and, for Fairfax, of passion.

"Ah, I don't know," she answered him slowly, "I think it's lovely and quiet here. Back in Troy next week when we work overtime and the boss gets mad, I'll think of it likely, I guess."

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 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.