The English Cardinal turned with a little abrupt movement and
stood looking at him. There was a silence.

"Well--come," he said.



(II)

The contrast between these two great Princes of the Church and
their Lord and Master struck Monsignor very strongly, in spite of
his excitement, as he followed his chief into the Pope's room,
and saw an almost startlingly commonplace man, of middle size,
rise up from the table at which he was writing.

He was a Frenchman, Monsignor knew, and not an exceptional
Frenchman. There was nothing sensational or even impressive about
his appearance, except his white dress and insignia; and even
these, upon him, seemed somehow rather tame and ordinary. His
voice, when he spoke presently, was of an ordinary kind of pitch
and his speaking rather rapid; his eyes were a commonplace grey,
his nose a little fleshy, and his mouth completely
undistinguished. He was, in short, completely unlike the Pope of
fiction and imagination; there was nothing of the Pontiff about
him in his manner. He might have been a clean-shaven business man
of average ability, who had chosen to dress himself up in a white
cassock and to sit in an enormous room furnished in crimson
damask and gold, with chandeliers, at a rather inconvenient
writing-desk. Even at this dramatic moment Monsignor found
himself wondering how in the world this man had risen to the