or," said
the man. "The body of the court is full."

"That will do."

They went round a corner together and came to a door up three or
four stairs. The janitor unlocked this and threw it back. Farther
steps rose within the doorway, and Monsignor as he set foot on
the first had a vivid impression that the court he was
approaching was crowded with people. There was no sound at first,
but an atmosphere of intense and expectant force.

It was a little curtained gallery in which the priest found
himself, not unlike a box at a theatre, looking out upon the
court from the corner immediately adjacent to the wall against
which the raised seats of the judges were placed. He looked round
the court, himself sitting a little back in a kind of shame,
first identifying the actors in this dreadful drama. He was glad
that the gallery had no other occupant than himself.

First there were the judges--three men sitting beneath a
canopied roof, beneath which, over their heads, hung a large
black and white crucifix. He knew them, all three. There was the
Dominican in the centre--one of that Order which has had charge
of heresy-courts since the beginning--a large-faced, kindly
featured, rosy man, with a crown of white hair, leaning back now
with closed eyes, listening, and obviously alert; on his right,
farther from the spectator, sat the Canon-Theologian of
Westminster, a small, brown-faced man with black eyes, looking
considerably younger than his years; and on this side the third
judge, pale and bald and colourless--a priest who held the
degree of Doctor in Physical Science as well as in Theology--he
at this instant was drumming gently with a large white hand on
the edge of his desk.

Beneath the judges' dais was the well of the court, very much,
somehow, as Monsignor had expected (for this was his first
experience in a Church court), with the clerks' table
immediately beneath the desks, and half a dozen ecclesiastics
ranged at it. Some strange-looking instruments stood within
reach of the presiding clerk, but he recognized these as the
mechanical recorders, of which he had had some experience
himself. They were of the nature of phonographs, and by an
exceedingly ingenious and yet very simple system could be made
to repeat aloud any part of the speeches or answers that had
been uttered in the course of the trial. At either end of the
clerks' table rose up a structure like a witness-box, slightly
below the level of the judges' des