"You speak Italian, don't you, Fairfax?" his boss at the office asked him.
("Cielo azuro ... Giornata splendida...!") and he smelt the wet clay.
"I can point," laughed the engineer, "in any language! and I reckon I'll get on with Falutini."
CHAPTER XVI
The boss was a Massachusetts man and new to Nut Street, and Fairfax, when he took the paper with his orders from Rainsford's hand, saw for the first time in months a man of his own class, sitting in the revolving chair before the desk where his papers and schedules and ledgers were filed. The man's clothes were too thin for the season, his linen was old and his appearance meagre, and in his face with its sunken cheeks, the drooping of the eyes and the thinness of the brow, were the marks of the sea of life and its waste, and the scars of the storm. A year ago Fairfax would have passed Rainsford by as a rather pitiful-looking man of middle age.
The boss, his thin hand opening and shutting over a small book which looked like a daily ledger, regarded the engineer in his red shirt as Fairfax paused.
"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.