"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.
"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.