She felt him safe even within the walls of the heathen church, and she went directly back to Nut Street, her holiday hanging heavy on her hands, and she went in and helped her patron wash the dishes, and upstairs that night she stopped in her simple preparations for bed and reddened.
"Sure, ain't I a silly! He's went to church to meet his girl!"
Her morning's outing, the tramp and the excitement, were an unusual strain to Molly, not to speak of her emotions, and she cried herself to sleep.
Fairfax sat every Sunday in the same pew. The seat was to the left of the altar, and he sang with an ardour and a mellowness that was lost neither on the people near him nor on the choir-master. All arts were sympathetic to him: his ear was good and his voice agreeable. His youth, his sacrifice, his dying art he put into his church singing, and once the choir-master, who had taken pains to mark him, stopped him in the vestibule and spoke to him.
"No," Fairfax said, "I am not a musician. Don't know one note from another, and can't learn. Only sing by ear, and not very sure at that!"
He listened indifferently. As the gentleman spoke of art and success, over Antony's handsome mouth there flitted a smile that had something of iron in it.
"I don't care for any of those things, sir," he replied. "I reckon I'm a barbarian, a rudimentary sort of man."
He took a certain pride and glory in his station as he talked. There was a fascination in puzzling this mild, charming man, one of his own class, whose very voice and accent were a relief after the conversations he heard daily.
"You see," he said, "I happen to be a fireman in the New York Central yards down at West Albany."