or evil, could
wholly carry them away. In one word, _there was no light behind
these faces_, no indication of an incomprehensible Power greater
than themselves, no ideal higher than that generated by the
common sense of the multitude. In short, they seemed to him to
have all the impassivity of the Christian atmosphere, with none
of its hidden fire.

He gave the signal presently for the driver to move on, and
himself leaned back in his seat with closed eyes. He felt
terribly alone in a terrible world. Was the whole human race,
then, utterly without heart? Had civilization reached such a
pitch of perfection--one part through supernatural forces, and
the other through human evolution--that there was no longer any
room for a man with feelings and emotions and an individuality of
his own? Yet he could no longer conceal from himself that the
other was better than this--that it was better to be heartless
through too vivid a grasp of eternal realities, than through an
equally vivid grasp of earthly facts.

* * * * *

As he reached the door of the great buildings where he lodged,
and climbed wearily out, the porter ran out, hat in hand, holding
a little green paper.

"Monsignor," he said, "this arrived an hour ago. We did not know
where you were."

He opened it there and then. It contained half a dozen words in
code. He took it upstairs with him, strangely agitated, and there
deciphered it. It bade him leave everything, come instantly to
Rome, and join the Cardinal.

CHAPTER II

(I)

There was dead silence on the long staircase of the Vatican,
leading up to the Cardinal Secretary's rooms, as Monsignor toiled
up within half an hour of his arrival at the stage outside the
city. A car was in waiting for him there, had whirled him first
to the old palace where he had stayed nine months ago with Father
Jervis; and then, on finding that Cardinal Bellairs had been
unexpectedly sent for to the Vatican, he had gone on there
immediately, according to the instructions that had been left
with the _majordomo_.

He knew all now; wireless messages had streamed in hour after
hour during the flight across the Atlantic. At Naples, where the
volor had first touched land, the papers already mentioned full
and exhaustive accounts of the outbreak, with the latest reports;
and by the time that he reached Rome he was as well informed of
the real facts of the case as were any who were not in the inner
circle of tho