"When this caught my eye," he continued, "I could feel the stirring of a memory—one of those which I spoke of as being ticketed and ready to hand," with a smile. "Was it the heart which awoke this dim feeling of familiarity? No. Was it the daggers? Again, no. Then it must be the general idea—a heart pierced by daggers. At this I felt the memory struggle desperately in the brain cell; then suddenly it broke out. I had seen the design upon a bit of laced card in the show window of a religious goods store, when a boy. I recalled the title, printed at the bottom of the card, perfectly. It was 'The Seven Dolors.' The memory of this was specially keen, for I had not known what was meant by dolors, and had gone to a dictionary and found that they represented sorrows or pangs. This all came back like a flash, and instantly I counted the daggers transfixing the heart in the drawing. They were exactly seven.
"I was now convinced that the whole matter of the drawings had a religious aspect, and looked at them with a different eye. The cross was self-evident; the crowned woman could be none other than the Virgin Mary. However, it was not until I had consulted Father O'Leary that I got to the bottom of the matter. With the other things made plain to him, he instantly recognized this as the outline of the scapular," tapping the marginal sketch upon the newspaper.
For a few moments Fuller was silent. Then he said:
"That was a clever stroke, and it might go a long distance toward making some other things plain. But," and he shook his head in a rather hopeless way, "I confess that I don't see the reason for all these things being sent to Dr. Morse. In fact, there doesn't seem to be any sort of reason in it."
Ashton-Kirk arose.
"There is seldom any reason in things which we do not understand," said he. "But it often happens that when we do come to understand them then we find the reasons behind them solid and far-reaching enough."