urteous note from Cardinal Antonelli requesting the honour of being
received by her the next day at twelve o'clock. It was impossible to
refuse, and to her great annoyance she was obliged to postpone her
departure another twenty-four hours. She guessed that the great man was
the bearer of some message from the Holy Father himself; and in her
present frame of mind, such words of comfort could not fail to be
acceptable from one whom she reverenced and loved, as all who knew
Pius IX. did sincerely revere and love him. She did not like the
Cardinal, it is true; but she did not confound the ambassador with him
who sent the embassy. The Cardinal was a most courteous and accomplished
man of the world, and Corona could not easily have explained the aversion
she felt for him. It is very likely that if she could have understood the
part he was sustaining in the great European struggle of those days, she
would have accorded him at least the admiration he deserved as a
statesman. He had his faults, and they were faults little becoming a
cardinal of the Holy Roman Church. But few are willing to consider that,
though a cardinal, he was not a priest--that he was practically a layman
who, by his own unaided genius, had attained to great power, and that
those faults which have been charged against him with such virulence
would have passed, nay, actually pass, unnoticed and uncensured in many a
great statesman of those days and of these. He was a brave man, who
fought a desperate and hopeless fight to his last breath, and who fought
almost alone--a man most bitterly hated by many, at whose death many
rejoiced loudly and few mourned; and to the shame of many be it said,
that his most obstinate adversaries, those who unsparingly heaped abuse
upon him during his lifetime, and most unseemingly exulted over his end,
were the very men among whom he should have found the most willing
supporters and the firmest friends. But in 1865 he was feared, and those
who reckoned without him in the game of politics reckoned badly.

Corona was a woman, and very young. She had not the knowledge or the
experience to understand his value, and she had taken a personal dislike
to him when she first appeared in society. He was too smooth for her; she
thought him false. She preferred a rougher type. Her husband, on the
other hand, had a boundless admiration for the cardinal-statesman; and
perhaps the way in which Astrardente constantly tried to impress his wife
wit