“In a moment, your Eminence,” he said in Latin.  “Will your Eminence wait here?”

It was a little square room, with half-a-dozen doors, plainly contrived out of one of the huge old halls, for it was immensely high, and the tarnished gilt cornice vanished directly in two places into the white walls.  The partitions, too, seemed thin; for as the two men sat down there was a murmur of voices faintly audible, the shuffling of footsteps, and the old eternal click of the typewriter from which Percy hoped he had escaped.  They were alone in the room, which was furnished with the same simplicity as the Cardinal’s—­giving the impression of a curious mingling of ascetic poverty and dignity by its red-tiled floor, its white walls, its altar and two vast bronze candlesticks of incalculable value that stood on the dais.  The shutters here, too, were drawn; and there was nothing to distract Percy from the excitement that surged up now tenfold in heart and brain.

It was Papa Angelicus whom he was about to see; that amazing old man who had been appointed Secretary of State just fifty years ago, at the age of thirty, and Pope nine years previously.  It was he who had carried out the extraordinary policy of yielding the churches throughout the whole of Italy to the Government, in exchange for the temporal lordship of Rome, and who had since set himself to make it a city of saints.  He had cared, it appeared, nothing whatever for the world’s opinion; his policy, so far as it could be called one, consisted in a very simple thing:  he had declared in Epistle after Epistle that the object of the Church was to do glory to God by producing supernatural virtues in man, and that nothing at all was of any significance or importance except so far as it effected this object.  He had further maintained that since Peter was the Rock, the City of Peter was the Capital of the world, and should set an example to its dependency:  this could not be done unless Peter ruled his City, and therefore he had sacrificed every church and ecclesiastical building in the country for that one end.  Then he had set about ruling his city:  he had said that on the whole the latter-day discoveries of man tended to distract immortal souls from a contemplation of eternal verities—­not that these discoveries could be anything but good in themselves, since after all they gave insight into the wonderful laws of God—­but that at present they were too exciting to the imagination.  So he had removed the trams, the volors, the laboratories, the manufactories—­saying that there was plenty of room for them outside Rome—­and had allowed them to be planted in the suburbs:  in their place he had raised shrines, religious houses and Calvaries.  Then he had attended further to the souls of his subjects.  Since Rome was of limited area, and, still more because the world corrupted without its proper salt, he allowed no man under the age of fifty to live within its walls for more than