bbe's views."

Nani again smiled. "Exactly; he will tell him things which it is good he
should hear."

Thereupon it was at once settled with Don Vigilio that the latter would
put down the young priest's name for an audience on the following morning
at ten o'clock.

However, at that moment a cardinal came in, clad in town costume--his
sash and his stockings red, but his simar black, with a red edging and
red buttons. It was Cardinal Sarno, a very old intimate of the
Boccaneras; and whilst he apologised for arriving so late, through press
of work, the company became silent and deferentially clustered round him.
This was the first cardinal Pierre had seen, and he felt greatly
disappointed, for the newcomer had none of the majesty, none of the fine
port and presence to which he had looked forward. On the contrary, he was
short and somewhat deformed, with the left shoulder higher than the
right, and a worn, ashen face with lifeless eyes. To Pierre he looked
like some old clerk of seventy, half stupefied by fifty years of office
work, dulled and bent by incessantly leaning over his writing desk ever
since his youth. And indeed that was Sarno's story. The puny child of a
petty middle-class family, he had been educated at the Seminario Romano.
Then later he had for ten years professed Canon Law at that same
seminary, afterwards becoming one of the secretaries of the Congregation
for the Propagation of the Faith. Finally, five and twenty years ago, he
had been created a cardinal, and the jubilee of his cardinalate had
recently been celebrated. Born in Rome, he had always lived there; he was
the perfect type of the prelate who, through growing up in the shade of
the Vatican, has become one of the masters of the world. Although he had
never occupied any diplomatic post, he had rendered such important
services to the Propaganda, by his methodical habits of work, that he had
become president of one of the two commissions which furthered the
interests of the Church in those vast countries of the west which are not
yet Catholic. And thus, in the depths of his dim eyes, behind his low,
dull-looking brow, the huge map of Christendom was stored away.

Nani himself had risen, full of covert respect for the unobtrusive but
terrible man whose hand was everywhere, even in the most distant corners
of the earth, although he had never left his office. As Nani knew,
despite his apparent nullity, Sarno, with his slow, methodical, ably
organis