He walked across the room and she rose to her feet and looked after him.

"One of the men who are conspiring against the peace of the Church--banded together to fight the Church and its head."

"Don't say that, your Holiness. He is religious, deeply religious, and far more an enemy of the Government and the King."

She began to talk wildly, almost aimlessly, trying to defend Rossi at all costs.

"Holy Father," she said, "shall I tell you a secret? There is nobody else in the world to whom I could tell it, but I can tell it to you. My husband is now in England organising a great scheme among the exiles and refugees of Italy. What it is I don't know, but he has told me that it will lead to the conquest of the country and the downfall of the throne.

Whether it is to be a conspiracy in the ordinary sense, or a constitutional plan of campaign, he has not said, but everything tells me that it is directed against the politics of Rome, and not against its religion, and is intended to overthrow the King, and not the Pope."

The Pope, who had been standing with his back to Roma, turned round to her with a look of fright. His eyebrows had met over the vertical lines on his forehead, and this further reminder of another face threw Roma into still greater confusion.

"'When I come back, it will be with such a force behind me as will make the prisons open their doors and the thrones of tyrants tremble.' That's what he said, your Holiness. The movement will come soon, too, I am sure it will, and then your Holiness will see that, instead of being irreligious men, the leaders of the people...."

The Pope held up his hand. "Stop!" he cried. "Say no more, my child. God knows what I must do with what you have said already."

Then Roma saw what she had done in the wild gust of her emotion, and in her terror she tried to take it back.

"Holy Father, you must not think from what I say that David Rossi is for revolution and regicide...."

"Don't speak, my child. You cannot know what an earthquake you have opened at my feet. Let me think!"

There was silence for a moment, and then Roma gulped down the great lumps in her throat and said: "I am only an ignorant woman, Holy Father, and perhaps I have said too much, and do not understand. But what I have told your Holiness was told me in love and confidence. And the Holy Father is wise and good, and whatever he does will be for the best."

The Pope returned to his chair with a bewildered look, and did not seem to hear. Roma sank to her knees by his side and said in a low, pleading tone:

"My husband's faith in me is so beautiful, your Holiness. Oh, so beautiful. I am the only one in the world to whom he has told all his secrets, and if any of them should ever come back to him...."

"Don't be afraid, my daughter. What you said in simple confidence shall be as sacred as if it had been spoken under the seal of the confessional."

"If I could tell your Holiness more about him--who he is and where he comes from--a place so lowly and humble, your Holiness...."

"Tell me no more, my child. It is better I should not know. Pity ought to have no place in what duty tells me to do. But I can love David Rossi for all that. I do love him. I love him as a lost and wayward son, whose hand is raised against his Father, though he knows it not."

There was a bell button on the Pope's chair. He pressed it, and the Participante returned to the room without knocking. The Pope rose and took Roma's hand.

"Go in peace and with my blessing, my child. I bless you! May my fatherly blessing keep you pure in heart, may it strengthen you in all temptations, comfort you in all trials, avert from you every evil omen, and bring you into the fold of Christ's children at the last."

The Participante stepped forward and signed to Roma to withdraw. She rose and left the presence chamber, stepping backward and too much moved to speak. Not until the door had been closed did she realise that she was crossing the throne room, and that the Bussolante was walking beside her.

IV

When the Pope walked in his garden that afternoon as usual, the old Capuchin was with him. From the door of the Vatican they drove in the Pope's landau with two of the Noble Guard riding beside the carriage, and one of the chamberlains walking behind it, through lanes enshrouded in laurel and ilex, until they reached the summer-house on the top of the hill. There the old men stepped down, the Pope in his white cassock, white overcoat and red hat, the Capuchin in his brown habit, skull-cap and sandals. The Pope's cat, a creature of reddish coat, which followed him into the garden as a dog follows his master, leapt out of the carriage after them.

The Pope was more than usually grave and silent. Once or twice the Capuchin said, "And how did you find my young penitent this morning?"

"_Bene, bene!_" the Pope replied.

But at length the Pope, scraping the gravel at his feet with the ferrule of his walking-stick, began to speak on his own initiative.

"Father!"

"Your Holiness?"

"The inscrutable decree of God which made me your Pontiff has not altered our relations to each other as men?"

The Capuchin took snuff and answered, "Your Holiness is always so good as to say so."

"You are my master now just as you were thirty years ago, and there is something I wish to ask of you."

"What is it, your Holiness?"

"You have been a confessor many years, Father?"

"Forty years, your Holiness."

"In that time you have had many difficult cases?"

"Very many."

"Father, has it ever happened that a penitent, has revealed to you a conspiracy to commit a crime?"

"More than once it has happened."

"And what have you done?"

"Persuaded him to reveal it to the civil authorities, or else tell it to me outside the confessional."

"Has the penitent ever refused to do so?"

"Never."

"But if ... if the case were such as made it difficult for the penitent to reveal the conspiracy to the civil authorities, having regard to the penalties the revelation would bring with it ... if by reason of ties of blood and affection such revelation were humanly impossible, and it would even be cruel to ask for it, what would you do then?"

"Nothing, your Holiness."

"Not even if the crime to be committed were a serious one, and it touched you very nearly?"

The Capuchin shook out his coloured print handkerchief and said, "That could make no difference, your Holiness."

"But suppose you heard in confession that your brother is to be assassinated, what is your duty?"

"My duty to the penitent who reveals his soul to me is to preserve his secret."

"And what is your duty to God?"

The handkerchief dropped from the Capuchin's hand.