“No, sir; it is syncope.  She is recovered a little this morning.”

The priest passed his hand over his eyes and stood up.

“Well, I will be there,” he said.  “Shall you be there, sir?”

The other shook his head, standing up too.

“I must be with Mr. Brand, sir; there is to be a meeting to-night; but I must not speak of that....  No, sir; ask for Mrs. Brand, and say that she is expecting you.  They will take you upstairs at once.”

“I must not say I am a priest, I suppose?”

“No, sir; if you please.”

He drew out a pocket-book, scribbled in it a moment, tore out the sheet, and handed it to the priest.

“The address, sir.  Will you kindly destroy that when you have copied it?  I—­I do not wish to lose my place, sir, if it can be helped.”

Percy stood twisting the paper in his fingers a moment.

“Why are you not a Catholic yourself?” he asked.

The man shook his head mutely.  Then he took up his hat, and went towards the door.

* * * * *

Percy passed a very emotional afternoon.

For the last month or two little had happened to encourage him.  He had been obliged to report half-a-dozen more significant secessions, and hardly a conversion of any kind.  There was no doubt at all that the tide was setting steadily against the Church.  The mad act in Trafalgar Square, too, had done incalculable harm last week:  men were saying more than ever, and the papers storming, that the Church’s reliance on the supernatural was belied by every one of her public acts.  “Scratch a Catholic and find an assassin” had been the text of a leading article in the New People, and Percy himself was dismayed at the folly of the attempt.  It was true that the Archbishop had formally repudiated both the act and the motive from the Cathedral pulpit, but that too had only served as an opportunity hastily taken up by the principal papers, to recall the continual policy of the Church to avail herself of violence while she repudiated the violent.  The horrible death of the man had in no way appeased popular indignation; there were not even wanting suggestions that the man had been seen coming out of Archbishop’s House an hour before the attempt at assassination had taken place.

And now here, with dramatic swiftness, had come a message that the hero’s own mother desired reconciliation with the Church that had attempted to murder her son.

* * * * *

Again and again that afternoon, as Percy sped northwards on his visit to a priest in Worcester, and southwards once more as the lights began to shine towards evening, he wondered whether this were not a plot after all—­some kind of retaliation, an attempt to trap him.  Yet he had promised to say nothing, and to go.

He finished his daily letter after dinner as usual, with a curious sense of fatality; addressed and stamped it.  Then he went downstairs, in his walking-dress, to Father Blackmore’s room.