ues and capacities, such as they are, I
must leave to my superiors. But my desires are those of which your
Holiness has spoken. I ask no wages: I ask only to be allowed to serve
whatever cause my superiors may assign to me."

He continued to look at me, and for very shame I presently dropped my
eyes again.

"Well, my Lord Abbot?" he said again. "Let us hear what you have to
say."

Then my lord began to speak; and before he was half-done I wished myself
anywhere else in the world. For, as great men alone are capable, he
could be as lavish of praise as of blame. He said that I was all that of
which His Holiness had spoken; that I had been obedient and exact as a
novice; and he said other things too of which even under obedience I
could not speak. Then too he added what he had never said to me before,
that he was not sure that I had no vocation; but that since God spoke
through exterior circumstances as well as through interior drawings, His
Holy Will seemed to point, at least at present, to a life in the world
for me; that he was sure I would be as obedient there as here; that I
had learned not only to use my tongue but, what is much harder, to hold
it. And he ended by begging the Holy Father to take me into his service
and to use me in the ways in which perhaps I might be useful. All this,
of course, I now understand to have been rehearsed before; but just at
that time I had no more than a suspicion that this was so.

When he had finished, His Holiness once more turned and looked at me;
and I upon the ground: and then at last he spoke.

"My son," he said, "you have heard what his Reverence has said of you;
and I too have heard it, and not to-day for the first time. It seems
that you are right in thinking that for the present at any rate you have
no vocation to Holy Religion. Well, then, the question is as to what is
your Vocation, for Our Lord never leaves any man without a Vocation of
some kind. You are very young for such service as that on which we think
to send you; for we shall send you to the Court of England first, and
then perhaps now and again to France; but you look five years at least
older than your age, and, I am told, have ten times its discretion. I
need not tell you that you will have no very heavy mission given to you
at first; you must mix freely with the world and use your wits and see
what is best to be done, sending back reports to the Cardinal Secretary.
You will live at your own charges, as yo