to your Eminence that, after a certain interview with
you, I had come away, assuring myself that other sentiments were in your
heart than those you had avowed to me; that you had but half revealed
this, totally ignored that, affected credulity here, disbelief there,
my subtlety, whether right or wrong, would resolve itself into a mere
common gift--the practised habit of one skilled to decipher motives; but
if, while in your presence, standing as I now do here, I could, with an
effort of argument or abstraction, open your whole heart before me,
and read there as in a book, and, while doing this, place you in
circumstances where your most secret emotions must find vent, so that
not a corner nor a nook of your nature should be strange to me, by what
name would you call such an influence?'

'What you describe now has never existed, Massoni. Tricksters and
mountebanks have pretended to such power in every age, but they have had
no other dupes than the unlettered multitude.'

'How say you, then, if I be a believer here? What say you, if I have
tested this woman's power, and proved it? What say you, if all she has
predicted has uniformly come to pass; not a day, nor a date, nor an
hour mistaken! I will give an instance. Of Delia Rocca's mission and its
objects here, I had not the very faintest anticipation. That the exiled
family of France cherished hope enough to speculate on some remote
future, I did not dream of suspecting; and yet, through her foretelling,
I learned the day he would arrive at Rome, the very hotel he would put
up at, the steps he would adopt to obtain an audience of the Chevalier,
the attempts he would make to keep his mission a secret from me; nay,
to the very dress in which he would present himself, I knew and was
prepared for all.'

'All this might be concerted; what more easy than to plan any
circumstance you have detailed, and by imposing on your credulity secure
your co-operation?'

'Let me finish, sir. I asked what success would attend his plan, and
learned that destiny had yet left this doubtful--that all was yet
dependent on the will of one whose mind was still unresolved. I pressed
eagerly to learn his name, she refused to tell me, openly avowing that
she would thwart his influence, if in her power. I grew angry and even
scoffed at her pretended powers, declaring, as you have just suggested,
that all she had told me might be nothing beyond a well-arranged scheme.
"For once, then, you shall ha