At last the doctor bowed with his gentle air of discretion. "Evidently,
of an infectious fever as your Eminence so well says," he replied.

Two big tears then again appeared in Boccanera's eyes. Now that he had
screened the Deity from attack in the person of the Church, his heart as
a man again bled. He begged the doctor to make a supreme effort, to
attempt the impossible; but, pointing to the dying man with trembling
hands, Giordano shook his head. For his own father, his own mother he
could have done nothing. Death was there. So why weary, why torture a
dying man, whose sufferings he would only have increased? And then, as
the Cardinal, finding the end so near at hand, thought of his sister
Serafina, and lamented that she would not be able to kiss her nephew for
the last time if she lingered at the Vatican, the doctor offered to fetch
her in his carriage which was waiting below. It would not take him more
than twenty minutes, said he, and he would be back in time for the end,
should he then be needed.

Left to himself in the window recess the Cardinal remained there
motionless for another moment. With eyes blurred by tears, he gazed
towards heaven. And his quivering arms were suddenly raised in a gesture
of ardent entreaty. O God, since the science of man was so limited and
vain, since that doctor had gone off happy to escape the embarrassment of
his impotence, O God, why not a miracle which should proclaim the
splendour of Thy Almighty Power! A miracle, a miracle! that was what the
Cardinal asked from the depths of his believing soul, with the
insistence, the imperious entreaty of a Prince of the Earth, who deemed
that he had rendered considerable services to Heaven by dedicating his
whole life to the Church. And he asked for that miracle in order that his
race might be perpetuated, in order that its last male scion might not
thus miserably perish, but be able to marry that fondly loved cousin, who