"Yes," or "No," or "Thank you," was nearly the limit of her conversation, and she had difficulty in not adding "sir." At times she would accompany him, with Father John, to a matinée in New York to see a carefully chosen family production, or to have tea at the less-worldly restaurants. Occasionally she would burst out with a naïve exclamation. "I once rode in a Fifth Avenue bus with Sister Mary Joseph," was the sort of thing she would vouchsafe. "If you were n't to marry her," Father John said, "she would enter the convent as a lay sister." More and more as he met her Kerrigan's mind was taken up by the idea of her father. The contour of her face; a certain look of her eye; a light in her hair when the sun shone on it, would recall the inventor, and immediately within him would rise a measure of uneasiness which he could not get rid of. He once asked her if she remembered him. "He died when I was young, very young," she said. "An accident in a ferry-boat. I have spent all my life with the sisters." As he went to and from the convent, he often met the religious who had spoken of Holt's death as murder. And as often as he met her, so often would his mind revert to that sinister word, and he would find himself arguing about it internally, as though he were defending himself in a court of law. He would try to shake off the mood. "Of all the blamed foolishness!" he would tell himself angrily. But the idea would persist, and, growing morbid about it, he found himself reading carefully the charges of judges in cases of homicide. He went to the public library and conned upon the subject in encyclopedias. He read of the magnificent fair play in trial by jury. "I guess that settles it," he told himself. "There 's nothing to it." He went on, however, and, reading farther, he came on the ancient custom of trial by ordeal of justice--of the test of a man's innocence by touching the dead body of a murdered man. If the person suspected were guilty, blood would exude from the corpse. A couplet of Shakespeare's was quoted--from the play of "Richard III": O, gentlemen, see, see! dead Henry's wounds Open their congeal'd mouths and bleed afresh! The thing made his flesh creep. He read of the grisly test of the dead hand, and of the ordeal by fire and the ordeal by poison. "There 's no sense to that!" he muttered angrily, and little beads of perspiration gathered on his brow. Even the innocent would waver under such a test. Trial by jury--that was the sensible way. And then, one day, in a bleak sitting-room in the convent, he proposed to Agnes Holt. "Agnes--" he cleared his throat, and he was honestly husky--"I suppose you have understood that my intentions toward you had a wedding in view. I can make you very happy." "I must talk to the Mother Superior," she said, blushing furiously, her voice low. He took her hand, and, opening a case, put a ring on her finger.