"Is that so?" asked the other.

"It is."

"Very good. I only have authority to introduce the envoy.
Monsignor Masterman will be good enough to follow the other
gentleman. Your Eminence, will you come with me?"



(VI)

On looking back afterwards on the whole experience, that which
stood out as most shocking in it all, to the priest's mind, was
the abominable speed with which the tragedy was accomplished. It
was merciful, perhaps, that it was so, for even the half-hour or
so which elapsed before the priest had any more news dragged
itself to an intolerable length.

He walked up and down the little furnished room--some kind of
parlour, he understood, attached to a government building seized
by the revolutionaries, guarded, he knew, by a couple of men in
the passage, whose voices he occasionally heard--in a sort of
dull agony, far more torturing than positive objective fear.

He tried to comfort himself by retelling to himself the story of
the last few days; reminding himself how, after the first
outburst, when the police had been shot down by these new weapons
of which he understood nothing, and the palace had been taken,
and the city reduced to a state of defenceless terror--the