It was really time that something should be done.

* * * * *

And this was the man, thought Percy, _Papa Angelicus_, whom he was to
see in a minute or two.

The Cardinal put his hand on the priest's knee as the door opened, and a
purple prelate appeared, bowing.

"Only this," he said. "Be absolutely frank."

Percy stood up, trembling. Then he followed his patron towards the inner
door.

IV

A white figure sat in the green gloom, beside a great writing-table,
three or four yards away, but with the chair wheeled round to face the
door by which the two entered. So much Percy saw as he performed the
first genuflection. Then he dropped his eyes, advanced, genuflected
again with the other, advanced once more, and for the third time
genuflected, lifting the thin white hand, stretched out, to his lips. He
heard the door close as he stood up.

"Father Franklin, Holiness," said the Cardinal's voice at his ear.

A white-sleeved arm waved to a couple of chairs set a yard away, and the
two sat down.

* * * * *

While the Cardinal, talking in slow Latin, said a few sentences,
explaining that this was the English priest whose correspondence had
been found so useful, Percy began to look with all his eyes.

He knew the Pope's face well, from a hundred photographs and moving
pictures; even his gestures were familiar to him, the slight bowing of
the head in assent, the tiny eloquent movement of the hands; but Percy,
with a sense of being platitudinal, told himself that the living
presence was very different.

It was a very upright old man that he saw in the chair before him, of
medium height and girth, with hands clasping the bosses of his
chair-arms, and an appearance of great and deliberate dignity. But it
was at the face chiefly that he looked, dropping his gaze three or four
times, as the Pope's blue eyes turned on him. They were extraordinary
eyes, reminding him of what historians said of Pius X.; the lids drew
straight lines across them, giving him the look of a hawk, but the rest
of the face contradicted them. There was no sharpness in that. It was
neither thin nor fat, but beautifully modelled in an oval outline: the
lips were clean-cut, with a look of passion in their curves; the nose
came down in an aquiline sweep, ending in chiselled nostrils; the chin
was firm and cloven, and the poise of the whole head was strangely
youthful. It was a face of great generosity and sweetness, set at an
angle between defian