e, advancing
straight towards him down the roaring street, moved a canopy held
by figures he could not clearly make out, and beneath it,
detached and perfectly visible, on a white horse, a white figure,
its shoulders just draped in scarlet and its head shadowed by a
great scarlet hat, came slowly towards him.

(IV)

And so the day went by like a dream; and the man who still seemed
to himself as one risen from the dead into a new and wholly
bewildering world, watched and gathered impressions and
assimilated them. Once or twice during the day he found himself
at meals with Father Jervis; he asked questions now and then and
scarcely heard the answers; he talked with ecclesiastics a little
who came and went; but, for the most part almost unknown to
himself, he worked interiorly, busy as a bee, building up, not so
much facts as realizations, into the new and strange
world-edifice that was gradually forming about him. He was
present at the visit of the Pope to the tomb of the Apostle, and
watched from a tribune, even then so concentrated on observation
that he was hardly conscious of connected thought, as the vast
doors rolled back and a vision as of such a celestial troop as
was dreamed of by the old Italian painters came up out of the
vivid sunlight into the cool darkness of the basilica, as the
roofs gave back the roaring of the fervent thousands and the
clear cry of the silver trumpets; watched as the army of
ecclesiastics deployed this way and that, and the Father of
Princes and Kings came on between his royal children to the gates
of the Confession ringed by the golden lamps, and went down to
kneel by the body of the first Fisherman-King.

And again at Vespers, from the same tribune, he heard the peal of
the new great organs in the dome, and the psalm-melodies rocking
from side to side between the massed choirs; he glanced now and
again at the royal tribune opposite, where, each beneath a
canopy, the rulers of the earth sat together to do honour to the
Lord and His Anointed. And, above all, he watched, still with
that steady set face that made Father Jervis look at him once or
twice, the central figure of all, now on his throne, with his
assistants beside him, now passing up to the altar to incense it,
and finally passing out again on the _sedia gestatoria_ to the
palace where at last he ruled indeed.

Last of all, as the sun began to sink behind the monstrous dome,
and Rome stood out like an Oriental city o