The Cardinal put one question.

“And yet you are facing death on the understanding that it 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 would expect the Holy Father to go himself under such circumstances,” said the Cardinal gently and blandly.  “Do you not think that it might be harder for him to remain?”

Monsignor felt a wave of disappointment.  He had expected a revelation of some kind, or a vivid sentence that would make all plain.