Ten thousand thoughts, recurring and recurring, like pictures thrown on a wall, ran past his attention as the hours went by.  He saw the gathering of armaments—­the horizon tinged by the gathering war-vessels of the air—­the advance, the sudden storm of battle, the gigantic destruction from these vast engines of power of which he had learned nothing but their ghastly potentialities.  Or he saw the advance of this desperate garrison, dispersing this way and that for their war upon the world—­silent vessels, moving in the clouds, to Rome, to London, to Paris and Versailles, each capable of obliterating a city.  Or he saw, again, the submission of the world to the caprice of these desperate children who feared nothing—­not even death itself—­who crouched like an ape in a powder-magazine, lighted match in hand, careless as to whether or no themselves died so long as the world died with them.

He formulated nothing; concluded nothing; he rejected every conjecture which temporarily constructed itself in his almost passive mind.  He did not even yet fully understand that the question he had asked of himself months before—­the question that had tortured him so keenly—­as to whether these Christians who ruled had not forgotten how to suffer—­had been answered with dreadful distinctness.  He just perceived that the young Roman prince had been gallant; that the old man had been more gallant still, since those to whom he came had already proved that they would keep their word.  And now the third day was drawing to an end, and by midnight suspense would be over.

The fog still hung over the city; but towards sunset it lifted a little, and he raised his heavy head from his breast as he lay, half sitting, half lying, on the tumbled sofa and blankets on which he had slept, to see the red sunlight on the wall above him.  It was a curious room to a man who had grown accustomed to modern ways; there was a faded carpet on the floor, paper on the walls, and the old-fashioned electric globes hung, each on its wire, from the whitewashed ceiling.  He saw that it must be a survival, or perhaps a deliberate archaicism. . . .

The sunlight crept slowly up the wall. . . .

Then the door was unlocked from the outside, and he turned his head, to see James Hardy come smiling towards him.

(II)

“Good evening, Monsignor.  I am ashamed that I have not paid you a visit before.  But we have been very busy these days.”

He sat down without offering to shake hands.

The priest saw, with one of those sudden inexplicable intuitions more certain than any acquired knowledge, two things:  first, that his having been left alone for three days had been by deliberation and not carelessness; and second, that this visit to him only a few hours before the time of truce expired was equally deliberate.  His brain was too confused for him to draw any definite conclusion from these facts; but he made at least one provisional decision, as swift as lightning, that he must hold his tongue.