the sky.  Even at this morning hour, too, the air was hot and breathless, broken only by the slow-stifling lift of the south-western breeze that, blowing across countless miles of sand beyond far-away Egypt, gathered up the heat of the huge waterless continent and was pouring it, with scarcely a streak of sea to soften its malignity, on this poor strip of land.  Carmel, too, as he turned again, was swathed about its base with mist, half dry and half damp, and above showed its long bull-head running out defiantly against the western sky.  The very table as he touched it was dry and hot to the hand, by mid-day the steel would be intolerable.

He pressed the lever, and waited; pressed it again, and waited again.  There came the answering ring, and he tapped across the eighty miles of air that his Eminence’s presence was required at once.  A minute or two passed, and then, after another rap of the bell, a line flicked out on the new white sheet.

“‘I am here.  Is it his Holiness?’”

He felt a hand upon his shoulder, and turned to see Silvester, hooded and in white, behind his chair.

“Tell him yes.  Ask him if there is further news.”

The Pope went to the chair once more and sat down, and a minute later the priest, with growing excitement, read out the answer.

“’Inquiries are pouring in.  Many expect your Holiness to issue a challenge.  My secretaries have been occupied since four o’clock.  The anxiety is indescribable.  Some are denying that they have a Pope.  Something must be done at once.’”

“Is that all?” asked the Pope.

Again the priest read out the answer. “’Yes and no.  The news is true.  It will be inforced immediately.  Unless a step is taken immediately there will be widespread and final apostasy.’”

“Very good,” murmured the Pope, in his official voice.  “Now listen carefully, Eminence.”  He was silent for a moment, his fingers joined beneath his chin as just now at mass.  Then he spoke.

“We are about to place ourselves unreservedly in the hands of God.  Human prudence must no longer restrain us.  We command you then, using all discretion that is possible, to communicate these wishes of ours to the following persons under the strictest secrecy, and to no others whatsoever.  And for this service you are to employ messengers, taken from the Order of Christ Crucified, two for each message, which is not to be committed to writing in any form.  The members of the Sacred College, numbering twelve; the metropolitans and Patriarchs through the entire world, numbering twenty-two; the Generals of the Religious Orders:  the Society of Jesus, the Friars, the Monks Ordinary, and the Monks Contemplative four.  These persons, thirty-eight in number, with the chaplain of your Eminence, who shall act as notary, and my own who shall assist him, and Ourself—­forty-one all told—­these persons are to present themselves here at our palace of Nazareth not later than the Eve