hated me ever since I refused to help him to get a brother of his, one of
our former gardeners, out of prison. Deadly spite often has no more
serious cause. He must have thought that he had reason to be revenged on
me."

Thereupon Benedetta, exhausted, unable to argue any further, sank upon a
chair with a despairing gesture: "Ah! God, God! I no longer know--and
what matters it now that my Dario is in such danger? There's only one
thing to be done, he must be saved. How long they are over what they are
doing in that room--why does not Victorine come for us!"

The silence again fell, full of terror. Without speaking the Cardinal
took the basket of figs from the table and carried it to a cupboard in
which he locked it. Then he put the key in his pocket. No doubt, when
night had fallen, he himself would throw the proofs of the crime into the
Tiber. However, on coming back from the cupboard he noticed the two
priests, who naturally had watched him; and with mingled grandeur and
simplicity he said to them: "Gentlemen, I need not ask you to be
discreet. There are scandals which we must spare the Church, which is
not, cannot be guilty. To deliver one of ourselves, even when he is a
criminal, to the civil tribunals, often means a blow for the whole
Church, for men of evil mind may lay hold of the affair and seek to
impute the responsibility of the crime even to the Church itself. We
therefore have but to commit the murderer to the hands of God, who will
know more surely how to punish him. Ah! for my part, whether I be struck
in my own person or whether the blow be directed against my family, my
dearest affections, I declare in the name of the Christ who died upon the
cross, that I feel neither anger, nor desire for vengeance, that I efface
the murderer's name from my memory and bury his abominable act in the
eternal silence of the grave."