"I have talked to the Mother Superior, myself," he told her, "and that is all right." He drew her toward him, trembling a little, and on her forehead, with his mustached lips, he kissed her. He was suddenly still, and strangely cold. The touch of that skin reminded him of his last hand-shake with Leonard Holt. "I must put an end to this obsession!" he told himself angrily, that night at his hotel, and he poured himself stiff drinks of Bourbon. Should he tell Father John? No! he decided. He knew Father John well for a relative and a friend and a genial companion with lovable peccadillos. But he knew, too, that the little clergyman could thunder with the thunder of Sinai. Marry the daughter of a man in whose death he was implicated! Never would Father John consent. The cleric would not understand. What could a priest know of business? "It's no use going to him," Kerrigan decided. He stopped a moment, thinking. And, half-laughing and half-nervous, he remembered a conversation with a friend of his, a great Wall Street operator, who combined the shrewdness of his kind with his kind's superstition, and had recourse in moments of tension to clairvoyants and tarot cards. He told Kerrigan of M. Sergius. "He's a Greek monk--been expelled from Mount Athos for practising magic. What that man can tell you--" "I suppose the next thing you 'll tell me is that he raises spirits." "Listen! You just ask Cabot Montgomery how they found that will of Van Vleet's. Just ask him." "There's one born every minute," Kerrigan laughed, "and some of 'em live." "Listen, brother," Kerrigan was told, "this man does it for nothing. Do you get me? For nothing! If it's important enough he 'll do it. If not, outside. This is none of your country-fair crystal-gazers." In Kerrigan, too, was that strain of superstition that all men laugh at and all men have. And right now as he sat in a mental, spiritual whirlwind, the memory of that conversation came to him as a preserver. After all, if he put things to the test-- Of course it was foolish; it was ridiculous, but still-- Nothing could come of it, by any manner of means, and yet-- "What's the harm?" he laughed. At his time of life, he smiled, to put himself in the hands of a charlatan, to conjure up a spirit! In this century, with the telephone by his bedside, with the electric light overhead, to patronize a mumming magician! Nothing would, could happen. But that nothing would be his answer. It would mean that his life was free forever, purged of the foolish innuendos, the lunatic accusations of outsiders; the morbid worries of his own abnormal mind. Free to go ahead and be married, and to live happily ever after.