fraternizing through the gratings with the national army outside. But special correspondents of the London newspapers in Rome munched vacuity and excreted fibs, after their kind.

By twos and threes, plain (but very dignified) priests arrived: were admitted; and changed black for violet. One did not change. He was only Cardinal Courtleigh's new chaplain. The door of the Conclave was locked on both sides and bricked-up again.

Ensued another session of the Compromissaries, when their authentic act was put into prescribed form by apostolic prothonotaries. Ensued a final capitular assembly, in which the Act of the Compromise was published. Ensued a tempest of tongues and manners, dissolving (as storms do) in muttered thunders, less and less convulsive upheavals, a parcel of broken boughs and chimney-pots, stillness, peace, relief, and sun-bright April smiles.

[Pg 80]

[Pg 80]

CHAPTER III

When their lords had entered the Xystine Chapel for this last exercise, the conclavists went away about their own affairs; and the door was shut. The Reverend George Arthur Rose departed with the Bishop of Caerleon who was acting-chaplain to Cardinal Mundo. They walked in the royal gallery between the Xystine and the Pauline Chapels. George was in a mood of silence. His mind (as usual) was receiving impressions: the historic scene being enacted under his notice: the magnificent masks veiling the humanity of the actors: the mysterious gloom of the stage, its smallness, its air of cavernous confinement: the sour oppressive septic odour of architectural and waxen and human antiquity. He had been told that he would have to say mass before noon; and his head ached from fasting in that indescribably stifling effluvia. He remembered that, in former days necessity frequently had forced him to abstain from all food for a hundred hours at a time. Often, during four days in the week, he had eaten nothing: but that was in the open air, on the shore of a northern sea, or among the heather on moors and mountains, where the wind and the spray gave life. Here, the fast of less than twenty hours made him sick and sulky. However, it had to be tolerated. Semphill once had told him that a course in an ecclesiastical college, and the first few years of clerical life, were as disgusting as ten years' penal servitude. He took it at that with his eyes open. It was part of the business. He determined to go through with it. Still, he was in a better position now than he[Pg 81] ever had been before. He no longer was 

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