And the cardinal trudged stoutly on until he reached the Jesuit college.  There he stopped and looked cautiously around him.

“This unfortunate saintly dress is also a hindrance,” murmured he.  “Like the sign over the shop-door it proclaims to all the world:  ’I am a cardinal.  Here indulgences, dispensations, and God’s blessings are to be sold!  Who will buy, who will buy?’ I dare not now enter this scouted and repudiated sacred house.  I might be remarked, suspected, and betrayed.  Corilla, dear, beautiful woman, it costs me much pains and many efforts to conquer you; will your possession repay me?”

The cardinal patiently waited in the shadow of a taxus-bush until the street become for a moment empty and solitary.  Then he hastened to a side-door of the building, and, sure of being unobserved, entered.

A deep and quiet silence pervaded these long and deserted cloister-passages.  It seemed as if a death-veil lay upon the whole building—­as if it were depopulated, desolated.  Nowhere the least trace of that busy, stirring life, usually prevailing in these corridors—­no longer those bands of scholars that formerly peopled these passages—­the doors of the great school-room open, the benches unoccupied, the lecturer’s chair, from which the pious fathers formerly with such subtle wisdom explained and defended their dangerous doctrines, these also are desolate.  The reign of the Jesuits was over; Ganganelli had thrust them from the throne, and they cursed him as their murderer!  He had suppressed their sacred order, he had commanded them to lay aside their peculiar costume and adopt that of other monkish orders, or the usual dress of abbes.  But from their property he had not been able to expel them in this college Il Jesu—­within their cloisters his power had not been able to penetrate.  There they remained, what they had been, the holy fathers of Jesus, the pious defenders of craft and Christian deception, the cunning advocates of regicide, the proud servants of the only salvation-dispensing Church!—­there, with rage in their hearts, they meditated plans of vengeance against this criminal pope who had condemned them to a living death; who, like a wicked magician, had changed their sacred college into an open grave!  He had killed them, and he, should he nevertheless live?

With these fatal questions did the holy fathers occupy themselves, reflecting upon them in their gloomy leisure, and in low whisperings consulting with their prior.  And in such secret consultation did Cardinal Francesco Albani find the prior with his confidant in the refectorium.

“Do not let me disturb you,” he said laughing; “I see by your faces you are engaged in conversation upon the subject in which I yesterday took a part.  That is very well—­we can resume it where we yesterday broke off, and again knot the threads which I yesterday so violently rent.  With which knot shall we begin?”

The eyes of the pious Jesuit father flashed with joy.  Francesco Albani was inclined to favor their plans and wishes; they saw that in his cunning smile, in his return to them.