er was there emotion in it. He was as one
who laboured in the depths of the earth, crushed even in imagination,
yet conscious that somewhere birds sang, and the sun shone, and water
ran. He understood his own state well enough, and perceived that he had
come to a reality of faith that was new to him, for it was sheer
faith--sheer apprehension of the Spiritual--without either the dangers
or the joys of imaginative vision. He expressed it to himself by saying
that there were three processes through which God led the soul: the
first was that of external faith, which assents to all things presented
by the accustomed authority, practises religion, and is neither
interested nor doubtful; the second follows the quickening of the
emotional and perceptive powers of the soul, and is set about with
consolations, desires, mystical visions and perils; it is in this plane
that resolutions are taken and vocations found and shipwrecks
experienced; and the third, mysterious and inexpressible, consists in
the re-enactment in the purely spiritual sphere of all that has preceded
(as a play follows a rehearsal), in which God is grasped but not
experienced, grace is absorbed unconsciously and even distastefully, and
little by little the inner spirit is conformed in the depths of its
being, far within the spheres of emotion and intellectual perception, to
the image and mind of Christ.

So he lay back now, thinking, a long, stately, scarlet figure, in his
deep chair, staring out over Holy Rome seen through the misty September
haze. How long, he wondered, would there be peace? To his eyes even
already the air was black with doom.

He struck his hand-bell at last.

"Bring me Father Blackmore's Last report," he said, as his secretary
appeared.

II

Percy's intuitive faculties were keen by nature and had been vastly
increased by cultivation. He had never forgotten Father Blackmore's
shrewd remarks of a year ago; and one of his first acts as
Cardinal-Protector had been to appoint that priest on the list of
English correspondents. Hitherto he had received some dozen letters, and
not one of them had been without its grain of gold. Especially he had
noticed that one warning ran through them all, namely, that sooner or
later there would be some overt act of provocation on the part of
English Catholics; and it was the memory of this that had inspired his
vehement entreaties to the Pope this morning. As in the Roman and
African persecutions of