“You think it?” queried Gherardi dubiously.

“I know it!” replied Moretti rising, and preparing to take his departure, “But,—­play the game cautiously!  Make no false move.  For--understand me well, this man Leigh must be silenced, or we shall lose England!”

And with these last words he turned abruptly on his heel and left the apartment.

XXII.

Cardinal Felix Bonpre sat alone in the largest and loneliest room of the large and lonely suite of rooms allotted to him in the Palazzo Sovrani,—­alone at a massive writing table near the window, his head resting on one hand, and his whole figure expressive of the most profound dejection.  In front of him an ancient silver crucifix gleamed in the flicker of the small wood fire which had been kindled in the wide cavernous chimney—­and a black-bound copy of the Gospels lay open as if but lately consulted.  The faded splendour of certain gold embroidered hangings on the walls added to the solemn and melancholy aspect of the apartment, and the figure of the venerable prelate seen in such darkening gloom and solitude, was the crowning completion of an expressive and pathetic picture of patient desolation.  So might a martyr of the Inquisition have looked while the flames were getting ready to burn him for the love of the gentle Saviour; and something of the temper of such a possible predecessor was in the physically frail old man, who just now was concentrating all the energies of his mind on the consideration of a difficult question which is often asked by many hearts in secret, but is seldom voiced to the public ear;—­“Christ or the Church?  Which must I follow to be an honest man?”

Never had the good Cardinal been in such a strange predicament.  Living away from the great centres of thought and action, he had followed a gentle and placid course of existence, almost unruffled, save by the outside murmurs of a growing public discontent which had reached him through the medium of current literature, and had given him cause to think uneasily of possible disaster for the religious world in the near future,—­but he had never gone so far as to imagine that the Head of the Church would, while being perfectly conscious of existing threatening evils, deliberately turn his back to appeals for help,—­shut his ears to the cry of the “lost sheep of the House of Israel”, and even endeavour, with an impotence of indignation which was as pitiable as useless, to shake a rod of Twelfth-century menace over the advancement of the Twentieth!

“For the onward movement of Humanity is God’s work,” said the Cardinal, “And what are we—­what is even the Church—­when it does not move side by side in perfect and pure harmony with the order of Divine Law?”