fessor could justly find fault with him,
and he had never failed to pray for those in whom he discerned any
shortcoming.

Who would condemn such a just person? Not God, surely. Therefore when
his life had ended so suddenly that morning, his soul had been taken
directly to heaven.

Such righteousness as his had venial sins to expiate, what hope was
there left for men of ordinary earthly passions and failings?

It was a consolation to think of that, Angela told herself, now that
the tide of darkness had ebbed back to the depth of terror whence it
had risen; and when at last the long dream slowly dissolved before
returning reality the lonely girl's eyes overflowed with natural tears
at the thought that her father's motionless lips would never move
again, even to reprove her, and that she was looking for the last time
on all that earth still held of him who had given her life.

CHAPTER III

Three days later Angela sat alone in her morning-room, reading a letter
from Giovanni Severi. All was over now--the lying in state, the funeral
at the small parish church, the interment in the cemetery of San
Lorenzo, where the late Prince had built a temporary tomb for himself
and his family, under protest, because modern municipal regulations
would not allow even such a personage as he to be buried within the
walls, in his own family vault, at Santa Maria del Popolo. But he had
been confident that even if he did not live to see the return of the
Pope's temporal power, his remains would soon be solemnly transferred to
the city, to rest with those of his fathers; and he had looked forward
to his resurrection from a sepulchre better suited to his earthly rank
and spiritual worth than a brick vault in a public cemetery, within a
hundred yards of the thrice-anathematised crematorium, and of the
unhallowed burial-ground set aside for Freemasons, anarchists,
Protestants, and Jews. But no man can be blamed fairly for wishing to
lie beside his forefathers, and if Prince Chiaromonte had failed to see
that the destiny of Italy had out-measured the worldly supremacy of the
Vatican in the modern parallelogram of forces, that had certainly been a
fault of judgment rather than of intention. He had never wavered in his
fidelity to his ideal, nor had he ever voluntarily submitted to any law
imposed by the 'usurper.'

'That excellent Chiaromonte is so extremely clerical,' Pope Leo the
Thirteenth had once observed to his secretary with his