his face with
sudden colour, lifting his hands as on a rising tide, breaking
out suddenly in his eyes like fire, and in his voice in passion.
The rest saw it too; and in that tense atmosphere it laid hold
of them as with a giant's hand; it struck their tight-strung
nerves; it broke down the last barriers on which their own fears
had been at work.

"My children," cried the White Father, no longer a Frenchman now,
but a very Son of Man. "My children, do not break my heart! So
long and hard the labour--two thousand years long--two thousand
years since Christ died; and you to wreck and break the peace that
comes at last; that peace into which through so great tribulations
the people of God are entering at last. You say you know no God,
and cannot love Him; but you know man---poor wilful man--and would
you fling him back once more into wrath and passion and lust for
blood?--those lusts from which even now he might pass to peace if
it were not for you. You say that Christ is hard--that His Church
is cruel, and that man must have liberty? I too say that man must
have liberty--he was made for it; but what liberty would that be
which he has not learned to use?

"My children! have pity on men, and on me who strive to be their
father. Never yet has Christ reigned on earth till now--Christ who
Himself died, as I, His poor servant, am ready to die a thousand
times, if men may but themselves learn to die to self and to live
to Him. Have pity, then, on the world you love and hope to serve.
Serve it indeed as best you can. Let us serve it together!"

* * * * *

There was an instant's silence.

He stood there, his hands clasped in agony upon his cross. Then
he flung his hands wide in sudden, silent appeal.

There was a crash of an overturned desk; the crying out of
desperate voices all together, and as from the great tower
overhead there beat out the first stroke of midnight, the priest,
on his knees now, saw through eyes blind with tears, figures
moving and falling and kneeling towards that central form that
stood there, a white pillar of Royalty and sorrow, calling for
the last time all the world unto him.

* * * * *

But the President sat still at his desk, motionless.

CHAPTER IV

(I)

The sight on which the watcher's eyes rested, as he sat, hung
here in motionlessness above Westminster, a hundred feet higher
than the great St. Edward's Tower itself, was one not only
undreamed of, bu