game was well beyond his reach--it had a way of appearing to him at moments
intolerably attractive!

Nothing before him now, in these long days at the villa, but the hours of
work with Eleanor, the walks With Eleanor, the meals with his aunt and
Eleanor--and now, for a stimulating change, Miss Foster! The male in him
was restless. He had been eager to come to the villa, and the quiet of the
hills, so as to push this long delaying book to its final end. And, behold,
day by day, in the absence of the talk and distractions of Rome, a thousand
discontents and misgivings were creeping upon him. In Rome he was still
a power. In spite of his strange detached position, it was known that he
was the defender of the Roman system, the panegyrist of Leo XIII., the
apologist of the Papal position in Italy. And this had been more than
enough to open to him all but the very inmost heart of Catholic life. Their
apartments in Rome, to the scandal of Miss Manisty's Scotch instincts, had
been haunted by ecclesiastics of every rank and kind. Cardinals, Italian
and foreign, had taken their afternoon tea from Mrs. Burgoyne's hands; the
black and white of the Dominicans, the brown of the Franciscans, the black
of the Jesuits,--the staircase in the Via Sistina had been well acquainted
with them all. Information not usually available had been placed lavishly
at Manisty's disposal; he had felt the stir and thrill of the great
Catholic organisation as all its nerve-threads gather to its brain and
centre in the Vatican. Nay, on two occasions, he had conversed freely with
Leo XIII. himself.

All this he had put aside, impatiently, that he might hurry on his book,
and accomplish his _coup_. And in the tranquillity of the hills, was he
beginning to lose faith in the book, and the compensation it was to bring
him? Unless this book, with its scathing analysis of the dangers and
difficulties of the secularist State, were not only a book, but _an event_,