ung like a bag about his emaciated form.

Then the filament snapped and the sword fell. On a dismal, rainy
morning, some two months after the incident in the park, Jose was
summoned into the private office of the Papal Secretary of State. As
the priest entered the small room the Secretary, sitting alone at his
desk, turned and looked at him long and fixedly.

"So, my son," he said in a voice that froze the priest's blood, "you
are still alive?" Then, taking up a paper-covered book of medium size
which apparently he had been reading, he held it out without comment.

Jose took it mechanically. The book was crudely printed and showed
evidence of having been hastily issued. It came from the press of a
Viennese publisher, and bore the startling title, "Confessions of a
Roman Catholic Priest." As in a dream Jose opened it. A cry escaped
him, and the book fell from his hands. _It was his journal!_

There are sometimes crises in human lives when the storm-spent mind,
tossing on the waves of heaving emotion, tugs and strains at the ties
which moor it to reason, until they snap, and it sweeps out into the
unknown, where blackness and terror rage above the fathomless deep.
Such a crisis had entered the life of the unhappy priest, who now held
in his shaking hand the garbled publication of his life's most sacred
thoughts. Into whose hands his notes had fallen on that black day when
he had sacrificed everything for an unknown child, he knew not. How
they had made their way into Austria, and into the pressroom of the
heretical modernist who had gleefully issued them, twisted,
exaggerated, but unabridged, he might not even imagine. The terrible
fact remained that there in his hands they stared up at him in hideous
mockery, his soul-convictions, his heart's deepest and most inviolable
thoughts, details of his own personal history, secrets of state--all
ruthlessly exposed to the world's vulgar curiosity and the rapacity of
those who would not fail to play them up to the certain advantages to
which they lent themselves all too well.

And there before him, too, were the Secretary's sharp eyes, burning
into his very soul. He essayed to speak, to rise to his own defense.
But his throat filled, and the words which he would utter died on his
trembling lips. The room whirled about him. Floods of memory began to
sweep over him in huge billows. The conflicting forces which had
culminated in placing him in the paradoxical position in which he