"He was murdered!" The little religious's eyes flashed magnificently. "Murdered! In the way of business!" Kerrigan had heard that word used of Holt's end more than once. But the fourteen years had been full ones, and the matter had not troubled him much--things like that happened so often. And, besides, it was not true. A murder predicates a murderer, and he was no murderer. It was all a business arrangement. And the man could n't stand the gaff. That was all! "All rotten foolishness!" he swore. But somehow, this last time, perhaps on account of the dramatic meeting with the daughter, it would not go out of his head. And no more would go out of his head the thought and picture of Agnes Holt in her white dress and blue sash, with her Saint Cecilia profile. She haunted him night and day. At that period, peculiar in a man as the late thirties are in women, he fell in love, or in what for him would pass for love. In all his selfish business career he had known intimately no woman like her, and her aloof, unrifled virginity struck him like a blinding flash of light. "After all," he said, in the manner of his kind, "there is nothing on God's earth like a sweet, pure woman!" And for days he thought about her and about love, not as a young man might, in a burning equation with factors of living flame, but in the smoldering symbols of maturity, which are so long in the consuming and so hard to quench. He would go away from Broadway--"quit the whole condemned shooting-match," as he weirdly termed it--and take a place in Westchester or Long Island, a good, comfortable house with grounds to it. They would be glad to have him in such a community. He would be one of the village trustees; run for president. And he would fashion a new life there with a young and beautiful bride, whom everybody would envy him. There would be children, too. Undoubtedly there would be children. "She 'll be glad to get away from the convent," he thought shrewdly. And, after all, perhaps he had treated Holt a bit shabbily. He would make up for it in the way he would treat his daughter. She should wear diamonds. "I 'm thinking of marrying and settling down, Father John," he told the little clergyman one day. "I 'm glad to hear of it, Cousin Matthew," he said, rubbing his plump little hands, his cherub's face beaming benignantly. "I 'm delighted. I am so!" He shook his finger waggishly. "And I think I know the young lady, too." "It's the little Holt girl we met at the convent that day." "You must come over and meet her again," Father John planned. "I 'll talk to the Mother Superior." And so, with due chaperonage, Kerrigan met Agnes Holt several times, and each time he became more impressed with her. She would say little, blushing mostly, and playing with something in her lap. She understood vaguely that this portly, mustached man was thinking of marrying her, but that denoted nothing to her, so cloistered had her life been.