“Can I go in?” asked the priest.  “I am from Archbishop’s House.”

“I can take you into the gallery at the back, Monsignor,” said the man.  “The body of the court is full.”

“That will do.”

They went round a corner together and came to a door up three or four stairs.  The janitor unlocked this and threw it back.  Farther steps rose within the doorway, and Monsignor as he set foot on the first had a vivid impression that the court he was approaching was crowded with people.  There was no sound at first, but an atmosphere of intense and expectant force.

It was a little curtained gallery in which the priest found himself, not unlike a box at a theatre, looking out upon the court from the corner immediately adjacent to the wall against which the raised seats of the judges were placed.  He looked round the court, himself sitting a little back in a kind of shame, first identifying the actors in this dreadful drama.  He was glad that the gallery had no other occupant than himself.

First there were the judges—­three men sitting beneath a canopied roof, beneath which, over their heads, hung a large black and white crucifix.  He knew them, all three.  There was the Dominican in the centre—­one of that Order which has had charge of heresy-courts since the beginning—­a large-faced, kindly featured, rosy man, with a crown of white hair, leaning back now with closed eyes, listening, and obviously alert; on his right, farther from the spectator, sat the Canon-Theologian of Westminster, a small, brown-faced man with black eyes, looking considerably younger than his years; and on this side the third judge, pale and bald and colourless—­a priest who held the degree of Doctor in Physical Science as well as in Theology—­he at this instant was drumming gently with a large white hand on the edge of his desk.

Beneath the judges’ dais was the well of the court, very much, somehow, as Monsignor had expected (for this was his first experience in a Church court), with the clerks’ table immediately beneath the desks, and half a dozen ecclesiastics ranged at it.  Some strange-looking instruments stood within reach of the presiding clerk, but he recognized these as the mechanical recorders, of which he had had some experience himself.  They were of the nature of phonographs, and by an exceedingly ingenious and yet very simple system could be made to repeat aloud any part of the speeches or answers that had been uttered in the course of the trial.  At either end of the clerks’ table rose up a structure like a witness-box, slightly below the level of the judges’ desks.  Opposite the desks was the lightly railed dock for the prisoner.  The rest of the court was seated for the public, and as the spectator saw, was completely filled, chiefly with ecclesiastics.  Even the gangways were thronged with standing figures.  And over all hung that air of intense expectancy and attention.

He glanced once more round the court, once more at the judges.  Then he allowed himself to look full at the prisoner, whom he had not seen since his departure from Lourdes.