to go out, as group after
group broke away homewards. They had wished their Mother good
night, there in that great French town which has so wonderful an
aroma of little Nazareth; they had sung their thanksgivings; they
had offered their prayers. Now it was time to sleep under Her
protection, who was the Mother both of God and man. . . .

"Well, good night," said Monsignor. "We shall meet in London."

"I hope so," said the young monk gravely.

"I am afraid that young man will be in trouble," said Father
Jervis softly, as they came down the steps. "His book, you know."

"Eh?"

"Well, it's best not to talk of it. We shall soon know. He's as
brave as a lion."

PART II

CHAPTER I

(I)

Monsignor Masterman sat in his room at Westminster, busy at his
correspondence.

A week had passed since his return, and he had made extraordinary
progress. Even his face showed it. The piteous, bewildered look
that he had worn, as he first realized little by little how
completely out of touch he was with the world in which he had
found himself after his lapse of memory, had wholly disappeared;
and in its place was the keen, bright-eyed intelligence of a
typical ecclesiastic. It was not that his memory had returned.
Still, behind his sudden awakening in Hyde Park, all was a misty
blank, from which faces and places and even phrases started out,
for the most part unverifiable. Yet it seemed both to him and to
those about him that he had an amazing facility in gathering up
the broken threads. He had spent three or four days, after his
return from Lourdes, closeted in private with Father Jervis or
the Cardinal, and had found himself at last capable of
readmitting his secretaries and of taking up his work again. The
world in general had been informed of his nervous breakdown, so
that on the few occasions when he seemed to suffer small lapses
of memory no great surprise was felt.

He found, of course, a state of affairs that astonished him
enormously. For example, he discovered that as the Cardinal's
secretary he was an extremely important person in the country. He
had not yet ventured much on private interviews--these were for
the present chiefly conducted by the Cardinal, with himself
present; but his correspondence showed him that his good word was
worth having, even by men who were foremost in the government of
the day. There was, for instance, an immense amount of work to be
done on the subject of the relati