The Kennys did not know what had happened to Misther Fairfax. He sang on the stairs now and again as he had done when he first came to Nut Street. He bought the children sweet Jackson balls and the baby nearly died from "wan in its troat," and his mother picked him up by his socks and rattled the sticky sweet out of the child's larynx, and the cat finished it.
Tony's foreman was asked in to have supper and a late cup of coffee, and Miss Cora Kenny, whom "Pop" had sent to the Troy convent the first week of Antony's appearance in the Gents' Boarding and Lodging House, came home for a Catholic holiday, and she helped her mother. They made macaroni for Tito Falutini—"high Falutini," as Mrs. Kenny called him. The name stuck, and the macaroni stuck as well, fast to the plate; but the Italian, in bashful gratitude, his eyes suffused with smoke and tears, ate gratefully, gesticulating his satisfaction, and Cora Kenny studied him from the stove where she slaved to tempt the appetites of Fairfax and his friend.
Fairfax was proud of Falutini: he was not an ordinary acquaintance; he sang after supper, standing stiffly in a corner of the kitchen, his red shirt well opened at the throat, and his moustache like black velvet above his red lips.
"He sings betther than the theayter, Misther Fairfax," Mr. Kenny said; "it makes yer eyes thrick ye," and blew his nose, and Cora asked the singer softly if he could give them "When the band begins to play," or "Gallagher's Daughter Belle." Tito smiled hopefully, and when Fairfax laughingly translated, assured Cora Kenny by means of Fairfax again, that if determination could make a man
learn a foreign song, he would sing her "Gallagher's Daughter Belle" next Saturday night.
"Ah," she breathed, "she'd not be home then!"
"No," said Kenny, who was a lazy husband but a remarkable father, "that she wud not!"
The Italian fireman and the Irish lodging-house keeper's daughter gazed in each other's eyes. "Gallagher's Daughter Belle" ... dum ... dum ... Fairfax hummed it, he knew it. Kenny's daughter Cora—that would be more to the point: and he thought of Molly. He had not seen her since he had kissed her a fortnight before. Cora said she had never been bold before, had never let herself think how jealous she was, but to-night Mr. Tito High-Falutini's eyes made her a new woman. Cora said to her mother over her shoulder—
"Shure, Molly Shannon's the onlucky gurl."
"How's that, Cora?"