was audible—­the tumult of the hosts of God gathering about the camp of the saints—­he thought that already beyond the bars of the dark Gabriel set to his lips the trumpet of doom and heaven was astir.  He might be wrong at this time, as others had been wrong at other times, but neither he nor they could be wrong for ever; there must some day be an end to the patience of God, even though that patience sprang from the eternity of His nature.  He stood up, as down the pale moonlit path a hundred yards away came a pale figure of one who rode, with a leather bag strapped to his girdle.

II

It would be about three o’clock in the morning that the priest awoke in his little mud-walled room next to that of the Holy Father’s, and heard a footstep coming up the stairs.  Last evening he had left his master as usual beginning to open the pile of letters arrived from Cardinal Corkran, and himself had gone straight to his bed and slept.  He lay now a moment or two, still drowsy, listening to the pad of feet, and an instant later sat up abruptly, for a deliberate tap had sounded on the door.  Again it came; he sprang out of bed in his long night-tunic, drew it up hastily in his girdle, went to the door and opened it.

The Pope was standing there, with a little lamp in one hand, for the dawn had scarcely yet begun, and a paper in the other.

“I beg your pardon, Father; but there is a message I must have sent at once to his Eminence.”

Together they went out through the Pope’s room, the priest, still half-blind with sleep, passed up the stairs, and emerged into the clear cold air of the upper roof.  The Pope blew out His lamp, and set it on the parapet.

“You will be cold, Father; fetch your cloak.”

“And you, Holiness?”

The other made a little gesture of denial, and went across to the tiny temporary shed where the wireless telegraphic instrument stood.

“Fetch your cloak, Father,” He said again over His shoulder.  “I will ring up meanwhile.”

When the priest came back three minutes later, in his slippers and cloak, carrying another cloak also for his master, the Pope was still seated at the table.  He did not even move His head as the other came up, but once more pressed on the lever that, communicating with the twelve-foot pole that rose through the pent-house overhead, shot out the quivering energy through the eighty miles of glimmering air that lay between Nazareth and Damascus.

This simple priest had scarcely even by now become accustomed to this extraordinary device invented a century ago and perfected through all those years to this precise exactness—­that device by which with the help of a stick, a bundle of wires, and a box of wheels, something, at last established to be at the root of all matter, if not at the very root of physical life, spoke across the spaces of the world to a tiny receiver tuned by a hair’s breadth to the vibration with which it was set in relations.