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."
He saw her try to find her voice and her senses, and with something of his old radiance, he said—
"I'm a brute. I reckon I don't know how to make love. I've startled you."
"Ah, shure, ye don't know what ye're saying," she whispered; "the likes o' me ain't good enough."
"Hush, hush," he answered, "don't say foolish things."
She gasped and shook her head. "Ye shouldn't tempt me so. It's crool. Ye shouldn't tempt me so."