tient cat. The man he had come to see was sitting by the fire; dead-white features against a black background. Lean, emaciated, with his full black beard, black cassock, and high black headdress of the Greek monk, he seemed more spirit than body. He looked at Kerrigan with the insolence of a prince.

"Yes?" He did not ask Kerrigan to sit down.

Kerrigan had planned a neat speech, somewhat humorous, cynical, patronizing, but it had fled from his memory. He felt a sort of vague terror, as though this man were probing, uninvited, inside his soul and mind.

"I heard-down-town-" he muttered.

"Yes!" the monk said impatiently. "What do you want me to do?”

"I wondered, Mr.-ah, Mr.-"

"Brother Sergius !"

"I wondered, Brother Sergius, if it were possible to hold converse-or see-or have some communication-some certain communication-with a person who's been dead some time, some fourteen years-"

The monk was looking at him keenly. What had this well-fed business man, with the sweeping mustache and obviously massaged face, to do with the dim inhabitants of Death?

"How did this man die?" the monk Sergius asked.

"By accident," Matthew Kerrigan answered. "He drowned himself."

"What interest have you in him?”

"They say he killed himself on account of me," Kerrigan's voice broke out as though he were pleading to a judge. "It's not true!"

"You don't know whether it's true or not?" The Greek monk was studying Kerrigan's terrified features.

"Can it be done?" Kerrigan was surprised at himself, so hoarse his voice sounded, so sincere his tones. "I must know about it. Can it be done?" "It can be done." The monk nodded.

"If there's any fee-" Kerrigan suggested. "There is no fee." The monk laughed contemptuously. "I act for the good of souls, when it is necessary." He watched Kerrigan intently for some minutes. "On Monday morning-at two in the morning-if the weather is clear, I will send for you. Leave your name and address with the butler." And he turned again to the book he was reading, oblivious of Kerrigan, as a great lord might be of the peasant standing awkward and awestricken in his presence.

Financial agents admire Matthew Kerrigan. He is the sort of person who gives them no trouble. They are more cordial toward him than they are toward great bankers or great Wall Street men.

For great bank-presidents and stock-manipulators wage terrific and lyrical battles on the terrain of commerce, and though there are great Leipzigs and Jenas, there are also great Waterloos. But Kerrigan is safe. He takes no chances. His factories in Yonkers purr, day in, day out, making by the million that simple fastening device for women's corsets that has made him several fortunes.

"That's the way to make money," they will tell you. "Just hit upon something simple and necessary, like a hair-pin or a shoe-horn, that no other person has thought of. Make it and sell it to the public and bank your money in gilt-edged securities. Look at Matthew Kerrigan! And not And not fifteen years ago he was a clerk in an accountant's office."

Along Broadway, too, he is known favorably, in that happy-go-easy circle of minor actors, winemerchants, and women aspirants for the stage and movies. Head waiters are deferential, and slightly contemptuous toward him. He is a good spender, and yet- There is something repulsive, unhealthy in the way he enjoys food and drink and looks at women.

"Six things doth the Lord hate; yea, seven, which are an abomination unto him": and the first is haughty eyes. I cannot conceive that as denoting the light that shines from eyes lit from a sense of high and noble lineage, of chivalrous ideals, of just

power. I translate it by the eyes of Matthew Kerrigan those gray, full orbs which look about a room stating that there is no man present whose equal and superior Kerrigan is not. Eyes which tell you Kerrigan has money, and is prepared to spend money for what he wants. You know that man will get good measure for his money-shrewdness and sophistication gleam from them in a wary, reptilian way.

"They may call this the Rube City," Morgenthal, the little real-estate broker, announced at the Elks' Club, "but, believe me, there's one guy in town they can't put anything over on, and that's Kerrigan. He's wise. I tell you, boy, he 's wise. Did you hear about that baby at the Winter Garden that tried to pull that hard-luck story on him? You did n't, eh? Well, let me tell you something: She got hers. . .

There is one other place you may collect facts about Matthew Kerrigan and that is the down-town lunch-rooms of the financial district-uncomfortable, clattering places where you eat on a high stool at a counter and compute the price of your meal to the cashier as you go out. There is a race of clerks there, old men, natty but shabby of dress, pinched in the face, gray-headed, stoop-shouldered. Some of them are bitter and many are garrulous. They specialize in the early histories of well-known

men.

"I remember him when he was a bum in the street," they will tell you of nearly all of them; "when he had n't got a nickle for a shoe-shine. Did you ever hear how he got on his feet?" And then will follow either a sordid or a criminal story. And from them you can learn the story of Matthew Kerrigan and Leonard Holt.

An office friend had told Kerrigan of an eccentric inventor who lived out in his home town of Englewood, a poor, poverty-stricken, scatter-brained mechanic who plodded in a broken-down cottage on the outskirts of Englewood at magnificent and foolish dreams, such as aviation and perpetual motion. When Kerrigan went out to see his friend he was taken, on a rainy afternoon, to pass the dull hours, on a visit to the man Holt. Beyond an occasional dunning tradesman, who sneered at him, and an occasional equally poor friend who remonstrated with him and urged him to take a position in a factory, Holt saw no one. And when Kerrigan was introduced, he talked like a starved fanatic. Tall; loosely built, as though his jointures were precarious; stooped; with great greasy hands; sandyhaired; with burning blue eyes and a high forehead, and a listless mouth and chin-one might have been pardoned for believing him an impractical fool. He pointed out a large system of wheels and pulleys, of weights and springs. It was the per