This letter finished, signed and sealed, the Cardinal addressed it and enclosed it under cover to one of the secretaries at the Vatican who he knew might be trusted to deliver it personally into the Supreme Pontiff’s own hands.  Then stretching out his arms wearily he closed his eyes for a moment with a sigh of mingled relief and fatigue.  The night was very cold, and though there had been a fire in the room all day, it had died down in the grate, and there were only a few little dull embers now glowing at the last bar.  The chill of the air was deepening, and a shiver ran through the spare, fragile form of the venerable prelate as he rose at last from his chair and prepared to take his rest.  His sleeping room was a very small one, adjoining that in which he now stood, and as he glanced at his watch and saw that time had gone on so rapidly that it was nearly eleven o’clock, he decided that he would only lie down for two or three hours.

“For there is much to do yet,” he mused.  “This one letter to the Pope will not suffice.  I must write to Angela,—­to say farewell to her, poor child!—­and give her once more my blessing—­and then I must prepare the way at home—­for myself, and also for Manuel.”  He sighed again as the vision of his own house in the peaceful old-world French town far away, floated before his mental sight,—­almost he heard the sweet chiming of the bells in his own Cathedral tower; which like a pyramid of delicate lace-work, always seemed held up in the air by some invisible agency to let the shafts of sunlight glimmer through,—­once more he saw the great roses in his garden, pink and white and cream and yellow, clambering over the walls and up to the very roof of his picturesque and peaceful home—­the white doves nesting in the warm sun—­the ripe apples hanging on the gnarled boughs, the simple peasantry walking up his garden paths, coming to him with their little histories of pain and disappointment and sorrow; which were as great to them as any of the wider miseries of sufferers more beset with anguish than themselves.  He thought of it all sorrowfully and tenderly,—­his habit was ever to think of others rather than himself,—­and he wondered sadly, as he considered all the bitterness and hardships of the poor human creatures who are forced into life on this planet,—­why life should be made so cruel and hard for them,—­why sudden and unprepared death should snap the ties of tenderest love—­why cruelty and treachery should blight the hopes of the faithful and the trusting—­why human beings should always be more ready to destroy each other than to help each other—­ why, to sum all up, so merciful and divine a Being as Christ came at all into this world if it were not to make the world happier and bring it nearer to heaven!