Father Rogan answered nothing.  During the silence that succeeded, he sat with a quiet expectation beaming in his full, lambent eye.

“If you would listen—­” began Lorison.  The priest held up his hand.

“As I hoped,” he said.  “I thought you would trust me.  Wait but a moment.”  He brought a long clay pipe, filled and lighted it.

“Now, my son,” he said.

Lorison poured a twelve month’s accumulated confidence into Father Rogan’s ear.  He told all; not sparing himself or omitting the facts of his past, the events of the night, or his disturbing conjectures and fears.

“The main point,” said the priest, when he had concluded, “seems to me to be this—­are you reasonably sure that you love this woman whom you have married?”

“Why,” exclaimed Lorison, rising impulsively to his feet—­“why should I deny it?  But look at me—­am fish, flesh or fowl?  That is the main point to me, I assure you.”

“I understand you,” said the priest, also rising, and laying down his pipe.  “The situation is one that has taxed the endurance of much older men than you—­in fact, especially much older men than you.  I will try to relieve you from it, and this night.  You shall see for yourself into exactly what predicament you have fallen, and how you shall, possibly, be extricated.  There is no evidence so credible as that of the eyesight.”

Father Rogan moved about the room, and donned a soft black hat.  Buttoning his coat to his throat, he laid his hand on the doorknob.  “Let us walk,” he said.

The two went out upon the street.  The priest turned his face down it, and Lorison walked with him through a squalid district, where the houses loomed, awry and desolate-looking, high above them.  Presently they turned into a less dismal side street, where the houses were smaller, and, though hinting of the most meagre comfort, lacked the concentrated wretchedness of the more populous byways.

At a segregated, two-story house Father Rogan halted, and mounted the steps with the confidence of a familiar visitor.  He ushered Lorison into a narrow hallway, faintly lighted by a cobwebbed hanging lamp.  Almost immediately a door to the right opened and a dingy Irishwoman protruded her head.

“Good evening to ye, Mistress Geehan,” said the priest, unconsciously, it seemed, falling into a delicately flavoured brogue.  “And is it yourself can tell me if Norah has gone out again, the night, maybe?”

“Oh, it’s yer blissid riverence!  Sure and I can tell ye the same.  The purty darlin’ wint out, as usual, but a bit later.  And she says:  ‘Mother Geehan,’ says she, ’it’s me last noight out, praise the saints, this noight is!’ And, oh, yer riverence, the swate, beautiful drame of a dress she had this toime!  White satin and silk and ribbons, and lace about the neck and arrums—­’twas a sin, yer reverence, the gold was spint upon it.”

The priest heard Lorison catch his breath painfully, and a faint smile flickered across his own clean-cut mouth.