has received warning of a plot against your life, and believing
that we can give information that will help him to defeat so vile
a conspiracy, he asks us for a special audience. It is not within
our power to promise more assistance than we have already given;
but this is to say that if your Majesty yourself should wish to
see us, we shall be pleased to receive you, with or without your
Minister, if you will come in private and otherwise unattended, at
the hour of 21-1/2 on Holy Thursday, to the door of the Canons'
House of St. Peter's, where the bearer of this message will be
waiting to conduct you to the Sacristy.

"Nil timendum nisi a Deo.
Pius P.P.X."

XII

The ceremonies in St. Peter's on Maundy Thursday exceeded in pomp and
magnificence anything that could be remembered in Rome.

It was a great triumph for the Church. In the face of the anti-religious
Governments of Europe she had proved that the mightiest sentiment of the
people was the sentiment of religion.

The Papal Court was proud of itself. Some of its members made no effort
to conceal their delight at the blow they had struck at the ruling
classes. But there was one man in Rome who felt no joy in his triumph.
It was the Pope.

At nine o'clock at night he visited the "urn" called the "Sepulchre."
Borne amid the light of torches on his _sedia_ with his _flabelli_
waving on either hand, under a white canopy upheld by prelates, he
passed through the glittering rooms of his own palace, along the dark
corridors of the Vatican and down the marble stairs, accompanied by his
guards in helmets and preceded by the papal cross covered with a violet
veil, into the great Basilica, lit only by large candles in iron stands,
and looking plain and barn-like and full of shadows in the gloom and the
smoky air. But after he had visited the Sepulchre, gorgeously
illuminated, while the cantors sang the _Verbum Caro_, after he had
knelt in silence and had risen, and the torches of his procession had
been put out, and he had returned to his chair to be borne into the
Sacristy, and the poor people, lifted to a height of emotion not often
reached by the human soul, had broken again into a last delirious shout
of affection, he dropped his head and wept.

At that moment the Sacristy was empty save for the custodian in black
cassock and biretta, w