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 unbearable, for it was as if she said, "I know what has happened," and tragically, in the voice that seemed so much sadder than it had once been, "There's nothing to be done."

He kept the box of paints and brushes at Krylenko's boarding-house where he came to be regarded with a kind of awe by the Ukranians as an odd mixture of artist and lunatic. Without thinking why, he kept the whole affair a secret from Naomi and his mother. He told them that the afternoons when he worked, painting and rubbing out, painting and rubbing out, among the rows of dirty houses, were spent in walking or doing extra work at the Mills. It became slowly a sort of passion into which he poured his whole existence. It was only in those hours when he worked horribly to put on bits of canvas and wood that strange, smoky glamour which he found in the Flats, that he was able to forget Mary Conyngham and the dull sordid sense of uneasiness which enveloped all his existence in the slate-colored house. No one save Krylenko saw anything he painted, and Krylenko liked it all, good, bad and indifferent, with all the overwhelming vitality of his friendly nature. (He had come in a way to treat Philip as a child under his special protection.) Sometimes he puzzled his head over the great messes of black and gray and blue, but he saw, oddly enough, what Philip was driving at.

"Yes," he'd say, rubbing his nose with his huge hands. "It's like that . . . that's the way it feels. That's what you're after, ain't it?"

He never went again to Hennessey's saloon, although the memory of Hennessey's epithet clung and rankled in his brain. "I don't want to get mixed up with that