tockings, and shoes
with silver buckles. Do you think that's precisely decorous--don't you
think it 's the least bit light-minded--in an ecclesiastic?"

"He--? Who--?" questioned Marietta.

"But the chaplain of the Duchessa--when he was here this afternoon."

"The chaplain of the Duchessa!" exclaimed Marietta. "Here this
afternoon? The chaplain of the Duchessa was not here this afternoon. His
Eminence the Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was here this afternoon."

"What!" gasped Peter.

"Ang," said Marietta.

"That was Cardinal Udeschini--that little harmless-looking, sweet-faced
old man!" Peter wondered.

"Sicuro--the uncle of the Duca," said she.

"Good heavens!" sighed he. "And I allowed myself to hobnob with him like
a boon-companion."

"Gia," said she.

"You need n't rub it in," said he. "For the matter of that, you yourself
entertained him in your kitchen."

"Scusi?" said she.

"Ah, well--it was probably for the best," he concluded. "I daresay I
should n't have behaved much better if I had known."

"It was his coming which saved this house from being struck by
lightning," announced Marietta.

"Oh--? Was it?" exclaimed Peter.

"Yes, Signorino. The lightning would never strike a house that the Lord
Prince Cardinal was in."

"I see--it would n't venture--it would n't presume. Did--did it strike
all the houses that the Lord Prince Cardinal was n't in?"

"I do not think so, Signorino. Ma non fa niente. It was a terrible
storm--terrible, terrible. The lightning was going to strike this house,
when the Lord Prince Cardinal arrived."

"Hum," said Peter. "Then you, as well as I, have reason for regarding
his arrival as providential."

XVIII

"I think something must have happened to my watch," Peter said, next
day.

Indeed, its hands moved with extraordinary, with exasperating slowness.

"It seems absurd that it should do no good to push them on," he thought.

He would force himself, between twice ascertaining their position, to
wait for a period that felt like an eternity, walking about miserably,
and smoking flavourless cigarettes;--then he would stand amazed,
incredulous, when, with a smirk (as it almost struck him) of ironical
complacence, they would attest that his eternity had lasted something
near a quarter of an hour.

"And I had professed myself a Kantian, and made light of the objective
reality of Time! thou laggard, Time!" he cried, and shook his fist at
Space, Time's unof