it did not make him easier because the padre listened so
obsequiously, with never a quiver before the horror and misery pictured.
He only listened, this man of God, noting it all deferentially, item by
item, with a smiling gesture that he heard and understood, and was quite
ready for the next. Maximilian became aware at last of his own low
stooping. And that moment he stopped abruptly.

"The Lord reward Your Majesty's tender heart," now spoke the priest,
"and may the reward be such as a ruler should expect from his God!"

"What do you mean?" demanded Maximilian in impatient anger. "Have all
the barbarities of civil war no power to move you? Do I not know that
the savagery has already begun?"

The curate crossed himself. In humility he would bear the charge of
hardness of heart. "Power to stir me?" he repeated. "If Your Majesty
would think on his power to bring this same savagery to an end! That is
his reward offered by Heaven, the reward of bringing holy peace to a
stricken land."

"Did I not come for that? You only remind me how I have failed."

"And why, sire? Because your instruments were not blessed. The French
oppressed the Church as well as the people. But now the French are
leaving. It is the hand of Providence."

"She _said_ he would interpret the will of Heaven!" Maximilian
exclaimed.

The priest heard, stammered, and went to wreck miserably, as a hypocrite
unmasked knows that his next word must sound like hypocrisy. How slyly
she had checkmated him! Forseeing his thrust, she had countered his
every shift of cunning through this feeble fencer before him. And the
mistake he had made, in sending Maximilian to her! For a moment the
expression of the apostate Lutheran was very ugly in its baffled rage.
But he was too wise a trainer to lose patience utterly. He realized
instead that the struggle was harder than any he had yet had with his
royal dupe, since now his real antagonist was the young Frenchwoman.

"I? I interpret the word of God?" He said it very humbly, with bowed
head. "Alas, Your Majesty knows I am the last to presume to that. But
there are those who can. There is the Holy Father in Rome, who is
infallible. I only know that _he_ told Your Majesty's servant,
myself, that a ruler blessed by the Church is an instrument of God. But
if the ruler turns his back ere his work is done----"

Maximilian's nostrils were dilating strangely, and the consummate
tempter hurried on. He exalted the grandeur of