not criminal, and his aims were not unrighteous. I have been instructed
on this subject, and now I see everything in a different light. Yes, a
great mistake, although a natural and excusable one, and if that was the
cause and origin of this terrible event, the Holy Father who led you so
far...."

"Your Holiness!"

"Nay, you must not expect too much. It is little I can do. But now that
governments are falling and parliaments are being dissolved, David Rossi
must come back...."

Roma made a cry of joy, and the Pope raised a warning finger.

"Ah, you must never think of that, my child--you must never think of it.
It is a pity, a great pity, but, alas! it cannot be otherwise now. If
your husband is to come back, his name must be kept clean and
unblemished, and you can never rejoin him whatever happens."

Dizzy with a sense of the Pope's awful error, Roma turned away her face.

"But if you tell me that what you did was due to the compulsion that was
put upon you to denounce David Rossi, he must come forward, whatever the
consequences, to defend you and plead for you. He must say to the world
and to your judges: 'It is true that this poor lady has committed a
crime--an awful crime, such as shuts the guilty one out of the fold of
the human family--but she was provoked to it by a falsehood. The dead
man deceived her. He was her betrayer, her assassin, for he tried to
slay her soul. Therefore you will have mercy upon her as you hope for
mercy, you will forgive her as you hope for forgiveness, and in the
peace and penance of some holy convent she will wipe out the past of her
unhappy life as Mary wiped out her sins in the tears with which she
washed her Master's feet.'"

He had risen in the exaltation of his emotion, and raised one hand over
his head, but Roma, in the toils of the terrible error, had dropped to
her knees at his feet.

"Oh, I cannot die with a lie on my lips. Holy Father, let me make my
confession."

A vague foreshadowing of the coming revelation seemed to light on the
Pope, and he sat down again without a word. Mechanically he prepared to
receive the penitent into the Church, questioning her, instructing her,
calling on her to repeat the profession of faith, and finally baptizing
her conditionally.

"Baptism wipes out all your sins, my daughter," he said, "but if for
your soul's comfort you wish to make a full confession before I give you
the Blessed Sacrament...."

"I do. I have wished it ever sinc