m,
bewildering the brain. Then another. Then another.

Beneath the two as they stood, shaking with the shock, silent and
open-mouthed, staring at one another, in the courtyard a door
banged; then another; and then a torrent of voices and footsteps
as the servants and grooms poured out of the lower doors.

(III)

Two hours later the two ecclesiastics sat together, on either
side of the large table in the Cardinal's room. The Cardinal
passed over the sheets one by one as he finished them. One set
was being brought straight up here from the little office at the
end of the hall. Another set, they knew, was simultaneously being
read aloud by Lord Southminster in the hall below.

The guns had aroused even the most drowsy; and the whole
population, village as well as castle, had poured into the
courtyard to hear the news.

Monsignor sat and read sheet after sheet after his chief,
hopelessly trying to notice and remember the principal points of
the report. Everything was recorded there--the assembling of the
crowds, the difficulty that the later members found in getting
through into the House at all; the breakdown of the police
arrangements; and the storming of the wireless station by an
organized mob, many of whom had been later put under arrest.

Then there was the Prime Minister's speech, recorded word by word
in the machines, and translated later, by machinery instead of by
human labour, into terms of dots and dashes, themselves
transmitted again over miles of country, and retranslated again
by mechanical devices into these actual printed sheets that the
two were reading.

The speech was given in full, down to that tremendous scene when
half the House, distracted at last by the cries that grew nearer
and nearer, and the messengers that appeared and reappeared from
outside, had risen to its feet. And then----

The Cardinal leaned back suddenly, with a swift indrawing of his
breath that was almost the first sign of emotion that he had shown.

Monsignor looked up. The last two sheets were still under the
ringed hand that lay upon the table.

"Well, it's done," said the Cardinal softly, almost as if talking
to himself. "But it needed his last card."

"Your Eminence?"

"The announcement as to the East," went on the other, with the
same air. "I thank God it came in time."

"Your Eminence, I don't understand."

The Cardinal looked at him full.

"Why," he said, "the Holy Father was accepted as Arbitrator o