Monsignor Mario left the room without a word.

VIII

The Baron pushed out an easy-chair for Roma and twisted his own to face

it.

"How are you, my child?"

"One lives," said Roma, with a sigh.

"What is the matter, my dear? You are ill and unhappy."

She eluded the question and said, "You sent for me--what do you wish to

say?"

He told her the printer of certain seditious proclamations had been

arrested, and in the judicial inquiry preparatory to his trial he had

mentioned the name of the person who had employed and paid him.

"You cannot but be aware, my dear, that you have rendered yourself

liable to prosecution, and that nothing--nothing whatever--could have

saved you from public exposure but the good offices of a powerful

friend."

Roma drew her lips tightly together and made no answer.

"But what a situation for a Minister! To find himself ruled by his

feelings for a friend, and thus weakened in the eyes of his servants,

who ought to have no possible hold on him."

Roma's gloomy face began to be compressed with scorn.

"You have perhaps not realised the full measure of the indignity that

might have befallen you. For instance--a cruel necessity--the police

would have been making a domiciliary visitation in your apartment at

this moment."

Roma made a faint, involuntary cry, and half rose from her seat.

"Your letters and most secret papers would by this time be exposed to

the eyes of the police.... No, no, my child; calm yourself, be seated;

thanks to my intervention, this will not occur."

Roma looked at him, and found him more repulsive to her at that moment

than he had ever been before. Even his daintiness repelled her--the

modified perfume about his clothes, his waxed moustache, his rounded

finger-nails, and all the other refinements of the man who loves himself

and sets out to please the senses of women.

"You will allow, my dear, that I have had sufficient to humiliate me

without this further experience. A ward who persistently disregards the

laws of propriety and exposes herself to criticism in the most ordinary

acts of life was surely a sufficient trial. But that was not enough.

Almost as soon as you have passed out of my legal control you join with

those who are talking and conspiring against me."

Roma continued to sit with a gloomy and defiant face.

"How am I to defend myself against the humiliations you put upon me in

your own mind? You give me no chance to defend myself. I cannot know

what others have told you. I know no more than you repeat to me, and

that is nothing at all."




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