"Ah, wurra sor," she finished, "Oi cud go down on me knees to him if it wasn't for Pathrick Kenny. It was an evil day when that Hitalian came to the dure. Wud ye now?" she offered, as though she suggested that he should view sacred relics, "wud ye feel like goin' up to his room and castin' an eye?"
Peter Rainsford did so, feeling that he was taking a man at a disadvantage, but consoling himself with the thought that Fairfax's disappearance warranted the invasion. Mrs. Kenny, the baby on her arm, stood by his side, and called over the objects as though she were a showman at a museum.
"That's his bury, sor, and the best wan in the hotel, and them's his little ornyments an' foolin's in order on
the top. Matty reds his room up, an' never a hand but mine puts his wash to rights." She pulled a drawer open. "His beautiful starched shirts, I doos them with me own hands and charges him as though he was me son; an' there is his crayvats, an' over there," she pointed with her thumb, "stud the image, bad cess to the Hitalian an' his likes, Mr. Rainsford, an' many's the time I've stud beyont the dure an' heard him sing and whustle beautiful, whilst he was a-carvin' of it."
Rainsford looked at a small design pinned against the wall: he considered it long.
"Do ye think that he's kilt then?" asked the Irish woman.
The paymaster returned briskly. "No, I don't think so. I hope he has not come to any harm."
"His readin' buks, sor," she said, "wud ye cast an eye?"
But here Rainsford refused, and returning to his own lodgings higher up in the town, and on a better scale, went home thoughtful, touched, and with a feeling of kinship with the truant engineer. Before, however, he could take any steps to look for Fairfax, a coloured man from somewhere appeared with the request that Mrs. Kenny send all Fairfax's things. The mysterious lodger enclosed, moreover, a week's board in advance, but no address; nor had the coloured man any information for Nut Street, and a decided antipathy existed between George Washington and Mary Kenny. She was pale when she packed up Fairfax's belongings and cried into his trunk, as she laid the drawing of Bella Carew next to the unopened packet of his mother's treasures. She was unconscious of what sacred thing she touched, but she was cut to the heart, as was poor Falutini. Peter Rainsford, who had not gone far in his friendship with the elusive Fairfax, was only disappointed.