Faithful, I found them intolerable. The Bishop of Caerleon at present is the exception which proves the rule, because he came to me in the teeth of calumny."

"You are hard, Mr. Rose, very hard."

"I am what you and your Catholics have made me."

"Poor child—poor child," the cardinal adjected.

"I request that Your Eminency will not speak to me in that tone. I disdain your pity at this date. The catastrophe is complete. I nourish no grudge, and seek no revenge, no, nor even justice. I am content to live my own life, avoiding all my brother-Catholics, or treating them with severe forbearance when circumstances throw them in my path. I don't squash cockroaches."

"The effect on your own soul?"

"The effect on my own soul is perfectly ghastly. I positively loathe and distrust all Catholics, known[Pg 24] and unknown, with one exception. I have become a rudderless derelict. I have lost all faith in man, and I have lost the power of loving."

[Pg 24]

"How terrible!" the cardinal sighed. "And are there none of us for whom you have a kindly feeling? At times, I mean? You cannot always be in a state of white-hot rage, you know. There must be intervals when the tension of your anger is relaxed, perhaps from sheer fatigue: for anger is deliberate, the effect of exertion. And, in those intervals, have you never caught yourself thinking kindly of any of your former friends?"

"Yes, Eminency, there are very many, clerks and laics both, with whom, strange to say, when my anger is not dynamic, I sometimes wish to be reconciled. However, I myself never will approach them; and they afford me no opportunity. They do not come to me, as you have come." His voice softened a little; and his smile was an alluring illumination.

"But you would meet them with vituperation; and naturally they don't want to expose themselves to affronts?"

"Oh, of course if their sense of duty (to say nothing of decency) does not teach them to risk affronts——But I will not say before hand how I should meet them beyond this: it would depend on their demeanour to me. I should do as I am done by. For example," he turned to the ruddy bishop, "did I heave chairs or china-ware at Your Lordship?"

"Indeed you did not, although I thoroughly 

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