er's, the hour was
so early that he had to wait there awhile. He had never better realised
the enormity of those four curving rows of columns, forming a forest of
gigantic stone trunks among which nobody ever promenades. In fact, the
spot is a grandiose and dreary desert, and one asks oneself the why and
wherefore of such a majestic porticus. Doubtless, however, it was for its
sole majesty, for the mere pomp of decoration, that this colonnade was
reared; and therein, again, one finds the whole Roman spirit. However,
Pierre at last turned into the Via di Sant' Offizio, and passing the
sacristy of St. Peter's, found himself before the Palace of the Holy
Office in a solitary silent district, which the footfall of pedestrians
or the rumble of wheels but seldom disturbs. The sun alone lives there,
in sheets of light which spread slowly over the small, white paving. You
divine the vicinity of the Basilica, for there is a smell as of incense,
a cloisteral quiescence as of the slumber of centuries. And at one corner
the Palace of the Holy Office rises up with heavy, disquieting bareness,
only a single row of windows piercing its lofty, yellow front. The wall
which skirts a side street looks yet more suspicious with its row of even
smaller casements, mere peep-holes with glaucous panes. In the bright
sunlight this huge cube of mud-coloured masonry ever seems asleep,
mysterious, and closed like a prison, with scarcely an aperture for
communication with the outer world.

Pierre shivered, but then smiled as at an act of childishness, for he
reflected that the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition, nowadays the
Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, was no longer the institution it
had been, the purveyor of heretics for the stake, the occult tribunal
beyond appeal which had right of life and death over all mankind. True,
it still laboured in secrecy, meeting every Wednesday, and judging and
condemning without a sound issuing from within its walls. But on the
other hand if it still continued to strike at the crime of heresy, if it
smote men as well as their works, it no longer possessed either weapons
or dungeons, steel or fire to do its bidding, but was reduced to a mere
_role_ of protest, unable to inflict aught but disciplinary penalties
even upon the ecclesiastics of its own Church.

When Pierre on entering was ushered into the reception-room of Monsignor
Nani who, as assessor, lived in the palace, he experienced an agreeable
su