“You think so?” and Verginaud shrugged his shoulders ever so slightly—­“Well!  For me, I believe that material as well as spiritual forces combine to fight against long-concealed sin and practised old hypocrisies.  It would not surprise me if the volcanic agencies which are for ever at work beneath the blood-stained soil of Italy, were to meet under the Eternal City, and in one fell burst of flame and thunder prove its temporary and ephemeral worth!  The other day an earthquake shook the walls of Rome and sent a warning shock through St. Peter’s.  St. Peter’s, with its vast treasures, its gilded shrines, its locked-up wealth, its magnificence,—­a strange contrast to Italy itself!—­Italy with its people ground down under the heel of a frightful taxation, starving, and in the iron bonds of poverty!  ‘The Pope is a prisoner and can do nothing’?  Monsignor, the Pope is a prisoner by his own choice!  If he elected to walk abroad among the people and scatter Peter’s Pence among the sick and needy, he would then perhaps be beginning to do the duties our Lord enjoined on all His disciples!”

Moretti had stood immovable during this speech, his dark face rigid, his eyes downcast, listening to every word, but now he raised his hand with an authoritative gesture.

“Enough!” he said, “I will hear no more!  You know the consequences of this at the Vatican?”

“I do.”

“You are prepared to accept them?”

“As prepared as any of the truth-tellers who were burned for the love of Christ by the Inquisition,” replied Vergniaud deliberately.  “The world is wide,—­there is room for me in it outside the Church.”

“One would imagine you were bitten by the new ‘Christian Democratic’ craze,” said Moretti with a cold smile, “And that you were a reader and follower of the Socialist, Gys Grandit!”

At this name, Vergniaud’s son Cyrillon stirred, and lifting his dark handsome head turned his flashing eyes full on the speaker.

“Did you address me, Monsignor?” he queried, in a voice rich with the musical inflexions of Southern France, “I am Gys Grandit!”

Had he fired another pistol shot in the quiet room as he had fired it in the church, it could hardly have created a more profound sensation.

“You—­you—­” stammered Moretti, retreating from him as from some loathsome abomination, “You—­Gys Grandit!”

“You, Cyrillon!—­you!—­you, my son!”—­and the Abbe almost lost breath in the extremity of his amazement, while Cardinal Bonpre half rose from his chair doubting whether he had heard aright.  Gys Grandit!—­the writer of fierce political polemics and powerful essays that were the life and soul, meat and drink of all the members of the Christian Democratic party!

“Gys Grandit is my nom-de-plume,” pursued the young man, composedly, “I never had any hope of being acknowledged as Cyrillon Vergniaud, son of my father,—­I had truly no name and resolved to create one.  That is the sole explanation.  My history has made me—­not myself.”