We will both sign it!"

"Just as you please!" said Braschi, with a smile, stepping to his
writing desk and rapidly throwing some lines upon paper, which he signed
after it had been carefully read by Albani.

"At length the business is finished," said Albani. "Now, Cardinal
Braschi, go to your signora, and surprise her with the news that
she holds in her arms a pope _in spe_. Pope Clement will soon need a
successor; he must be very ill, the poor pope!"

So speaking, he took leave of the future pope with a friendly nod, and
departed with as much haste as he had come.

"And now to these pious Jesuit fathers!" said he, stepping out upon the
grass. "It was very prudent in me that I went on foot to Corilla
to-day. Our cursed equipages betray every thing; they are the greatest
chatterboxes! How astonished these good Romans would be to see a
cardinal's carriage before these houses of the condemned! No, no,
strengthen yourselves for another effort, my reverend legs! Only yet
this walk, and then you will have rest."

And the cardinal trudged stoutly on until he reached the Jesuit college.
There he stopped and looked cautiously around him.

"This unfortunate saintly dress is also a hindrance," murmured he.
"Like the sign over the shop-door it proclaims to all the world: 'I am a
cardinal. Here indulgences, dispensations, and God's blessings are to be
sold! Who will buy, who will buy?' I dare not now enter this scouted and
repudiated sacred house. I might be remarked, suspected, and betrayed.
Corilla, dear, beautiful woman, it costs me much pains and many efforts
to conquer you; will your possession repay me?"

The cardinal patiently waited in the shadow of a taxus-bush until the
street become for a moment empty and solitary. Then he hastened to a
side-door of the building, and, sure of being unobserved, entered.

A deep and quiet silence pervaded these long and deserted
cloister-passages. It seemed as if a death-veil lay upon the whole
building--as if it were depopulated, desolated. Nowhere the least trace
of that busy, stirring life, usually prevailing in these corridors--no
longer those bands of scholars that formerly peopled these passages--the
doors of the great school-room open, the benches unoccupied, the
lecturer's chair, from which the pious fathers formerly with such subtle
wisdom explained and defended their dangerous doctrines, these also are
desolate. The reign of the Jesuits was over; Ganganelli had thrust
th