ion to so many different
things, this idea, this proposal, which the burning heart was making to
the will, had been continually flashing within her. Now it flashed no
longer. Jeanne contemplated it lying quiet within her. In that
figure sitting motionless on the bed, in the darkness, two souls were
confronting each other in silence. A humble Jeanne, passionate, sure of
being able to sacrifice all to love, was measuring her strength against
a Jeanne unconsciously haughty, and sure of possessing a hard and cold
truth. The rumbling of the carriages was dying out in the street; the
steps and the rustlings were less frequent in the corridor. Suddenly the
two Jeannes seemed to mingle once more and become one, who thought:

"When they announce his death to me, I shall be able to say to myself:
At least, you did that!"

She rose, turned on the light, seated herself at the writing-table,
chose a sheet of paper, and wrote:

"To Piero Maironi, the night of October 29,----

"I believe.

"JEANNE DESSALLE."

When she had written, she gazed a long, long time at the solemn words.

The longer she gazed, the farther the two Jeannes seemed to draw apart.
The unconsciously proud Jeanne overpowered and crushed the other almost
without a struggle. Filled with a mortal bitterness, she tore the sheet,
stained with the word it was impossible to maintain, impossible even
to write honestly. The light once more extinguished, she accused the
Almighty--if, indeed, He existed--of cruelty, and wept in this darkness
of her own making, wept unrestrainedly.

The clock of St. Peter's struck eight. Benedetto left a little group of
people at the corner of Via di Porta Angelica, and turned, alone, into
Bernini's colonnade, his steps directed towards the bronze portal. He
paused to listen to the roar of the fountains, to gaze at the clustered
lights of the four candelabra round the obelisk, and--tremulous, opaque
against the moon's face--the mighty jet of the fountain on the left. In
five minutes, or, perhaps, in fifteen minutes, he would find himself in
the presence of the Pope. His mind was concentrated on this culminating
point, and vibrated there as did the sparkling, ever-rising water at the
apex of the mighty jet. The square was empty. No one would see him enter
the Vatican save that spectral diadem of saints standing rigid over
there on the summit of the opposite colonnade. The saints and the
fountains were saying to him with one voice, that h