His young voice rang out, silver clear and sweet, and Aubrey gazed at him in wondering silence.

“To-night!” repeated Manuel, smiling and stretching out his hand with a gentle authoritative gesture.  “To-night the Cardinal will leave Rome, and I will leave it too—­perchance for ever!”

XXXV.

During these various changes in the lives of those with whom he had been more or less connected, Florian Varillo lay between life and death in the shelter of a Trappist monastery on the Campagna.  When he had been seized by the delirium and fever which had flung him, first convulsed and quivering, and then totally insensible, at the foot of the grim, world-forgotten men who passed the midnight hours in digging their own graves, he had been judged by them as dying or dead, and had been carried into a sort of mortuary chapel, cold and bare, and lit only by the silver moonbeams and the flicker of a torch one of the monks carried.  Waking in this ghastly place, too weak to struggle, he fell a-moaning like a tortured child, and was, on showing this sign of life, straight-way removed to one of the cells.  Here, after hours of horrible suffering, of visions more hideous than Dante’s Hell, of stupors and struggles, of fits of strong shrieking, followed by weak tears, he woke one afternoon calm and coherent,—­to find himself lying on a straight pallet bed in a narrow stone chamber, dimly lighted by a small slit of window, through which a beam of the sun fell aslant, illumining the blood-stained features of a ghastly Christ stretched on a black crucifix directly opposite him.  He shuddered as he saw this, and half-closed his eyes with a deep sigh.

“Tired—­tired!” said a thin clear voice beside him.  “Always tired!  It is only God who is never weary!”

Varillo opened his eyes again languidly, and turned them on a monk sitting beside him,—­a monk whose face was neither old nor young, but which presented a singular combination of both qualities.  His high forehead, white as marble, had no furrows to mar its smoothness, and from under deep brows a pair of wondering wistful brown eyes peered like the eyes of a lost and starving child.  The cheeks were gaunt and livid, the flesh hanging in loose hollows from the high and prominent bones, yet the mouth was that of a youth, firm, well-outlined and sweet in expression, and when he smiled as he did now, he showed an even row of small pearly teeth which might have been envied by many a fair woman.

“Only God who is never weary!” he said, nodding his head slowly, “but we—­you and I—­we are soon tired!”

Varillo looked at him dubiously; and a moment’s thought decided him to assume a certain amount of meekness and docility with this evident brother of some religious order, so that he might obtain both sympathy and confidence from him, and from all whom he might be bound to serve.  Ill and weak as he was, the natural tendency of his brain to scheme for his own advantage, was not as yet impaired.