t is all true?"

"I suppose so."

"Very well, then. That is faith. You need say no more. You have
been to confession?"

"This afternoon."

The old man was silent for a moment.

"As to the unreality, the feeling that the Church is heartless, I
think that is natural. You had a violent mental shock in your
illness. That means that your emotions are very sensitive, almost
to the point of morbidness. Well, the heart of the Church is very
deep, and you have not found it yet. That does not greatly
matter. You must keep your _will_ fixed. That is all that God
asks. . . . I think it is true that the Church is hard, in a
certain sense; or shall we call it a Divine strength? It is
largely a matter of words. She has had that strength always. Once
it nerved her to suffer; now it nerves her to rule. But I think
you would find that she could suffer again."

"Your Eminence!" cried the priest lamentably, "I am beginning to
see that. . . . Yourself. . . . Prince Otteone. . . ."

The Cardinal lifted his hand.

"Of myself we need not speak. I am an old man, and I do not expect
to suffer. Prince Otteone was another matter. He was a young man,
full of life; and he knew to what he was going. Well, does not his
case impress you? He went quite cheerfully, you know."

The priest was silent.

"What are you thinking of, my son?"

The priest shivered a little.

"Tell me," said the Cardinal again.

"It is the Holy Father," burst out the other impulsively.
"He was terrible: so unconcerned, so careless as to who
lived or died. . . ."

He looked up in an agony, and saw a look almost of amusement in
the old man's eyes fixed on him.

"Yes, do not be afraid," murmured the old man. "You think he was
unconcerned? Well, ought he not to be? Is not that what we should
expect of the Vicar of Christ?"

"Christ wept."

"Yes, yes, and his Vicar too has wept. I have seen it. But Christ
went to death without tears."

"But . . . but this man is not going," cried the priest. "He is
sending others. If he went himself----"

He stopped suddenly; not at a sound, but at a kind of mental
vibration from the other. Up here in these heights, under the
pressure of these thoughts, every nerve and fibre seemed
stretched to an amazing pitch of sensitiveness. It seemed to him
as if he had never before lived at such a pitch.

But the other said nothing. Once his lips opened, but they closed
again. The priest said nothing. He waited.

"I think no one w