Molly came and sat with him Saturday afternoons and Sundays. Fairfax made studies of his wife as she sewed, a modern conception of a woman sitting under a lamp, her face lifted, dreaming. He told Rainsford that when the lease was up he should vacate the studio, for he could not go on with his scheme for the monument. He had the memories of Molly's coming to him during the late autumn and winter afternoons. The remembrance of these holidays soothed and pardoned many faults and delinquencies. She seemed another Molly to the Sheedy counter girl, the Troy collar factory girl, and an indefinable Presence came with her, lingered as she sewed or read some book she had picked up, and if Fairfax the artist watched the change and transformation of her face as it refined and thinned, grew more delicate and meditative, it was Fairfax the man who recalled the picture afterward.

She was exceedingly gentle, very silent, ready with a word of encouragement and admiration if he spoke to her. She knew nothing of the art he adored, but seemed to know his temperament and to understand. She posed tranquilly while the short days met the early nights; she disguised her fatigue and her ennui, so that he never knew she grew tired, and the Presence surrounded her like an envelope, until Antony, drawing and modelling, wondered if it were not the soul of the child about to be born to him, and if from the new emotion his inspiration would not stir and bless him at the last?

What there was of humour and fantasy in her Irish heart, how imaginative and tender she was, he might have gathered in those hours, if he had chosen to talk with her and make her his companion. But he was reserved, mentally and spiritually, and he kept the depths of himself down, nor could he reveal his soul which from boyhood he had dreamed to give to One Woman with his whole being. He felt himself condemned to silence and only partially to develop, and no one but Molly Fairfax, with her humility and her admiration, could have kept him from unholy dreams and unfaithfulness.

His life on the engine was hard in the winter. He felt the cold intensely, and as his art steadily advanced, his daily labour in the yards grew hateful, and he pushed the days of the week through till Sunday should come and he be free. His face was set and white when Rainsford informed him that it would be impossible to give him "Saturdays off" any longer. Antony turned on his heel and left the office without response to his chief, and thought as he strode back to his tenement: "It's Peter's personal feeling. He's in love with Molly, and those days in the studio gall him."

Molly, who was lying down when he came in, brushed her hand across her eyes as if to brush away whatever was there before he came. She took his hat and coat; his slippers and warm jacket were before the stove.

"Rainsford has knocked me off my Saturdays," he said bitterly.

She stopped at the hook, the things in her hand. "That's hard on you, Tony, and you getting on so well with your work."

She didn't say that she could not have gone on any more ... that the walk she took the week before to Canal Street had been her last; but Fairfax, observing her, rendered keen by his own disappointment, understood. He called her to him, made her sit down on the sofa beside him.

"Peter has been better to you than I have," he said sadly. "I've tired you out, my dear, and I've been a selfish brute to you."

He saw that his words gave her pain, and desisted. He was going to be nothing more from henceforth but an engineer. He would shut the studio and take her out on Sundays. She received his decision meekly, without rebuffing it, and he said—

"Molly, if I had not come along, I reckon you would have married Peter Rainsford. There! Don't look like that!"

"Tony," she replied, "I'd rather be wretched with you—if I were, and I'm not, dear. I'd rather be unhappy along of you than the happiest queen."

He kissed her hand with a gallantry new to her and which made her crimson, and half laugh and half cry.

She went early to bed, and Antony, alone in the kitchen, raked down the coals, covered the fire in the stove, heard the clock tick and the whistles of the boat on the river. In the silence of the winter night, as it fell around him, he thought: "I reckon I'll have to try to make her happy, even if I cut out my miserable talent and kill it." And as he straightened himself he felt the Presence there. The solemn Presence that had come with her to his workshop and kept him company, and it was so impressive that he passed his hand across his forehead as though dazed, and opened the door of his bedroom to see her and be assured. She was already asleep; by her side, the little basket prepared, waited for the life to come. He stepped in softly, and his heart melted. He knelt down and buried his face in the pillow by her side, and without waking she turned her face toward him in her sleep.