"Indeed you will."

Roma's eyes were shining with fresh tears, and she was struggling to

keep back her sobs. "When we parted on the night he went away he said

perhaps we were parting for ever. I promised to be faithful to death

itself, but I was thinking of my own death, not his, and I didn't

imagine that to save his life I must betray his...."

But at that moment she broke down utterly, and the Pope, who had

returned to his seat, rose again to comfort her.

"Calm yourself, my daughter," he said. "What you are going to do is an

act of heroic self-sacrifice. Be brave and Heaven will reward you."

She grew calmer after a while, and then Father Pifferi made arrangements

for the visit to the Procura. He would call for her at ten in the

morning.

"Wait!" said Roma. A new light had come into her face--the light of a

new idea.

"What is it, my daughter?" said the Pope.

"Holy Father, there is something I had forgotten. But I must tell you

before it is too late. It may alter your view of everything. When you

hear it you may say, 'You must not speak a word. You shall not speak. It

is impossible.'"

"Tell me, my child."

Roma hesitated and looked from the Capuchin to the Pope. "How can I tell

you," she said. "It is so difficult. I hadn't meant to tell any one."

"Go on, my daughter."

"My husband's name...."

"Well?"

"Rossi is not really his name, your Holiness. It is the name he took on

returning to Italy, because the one he had borne abroad had been

involved in trouble."

"Just so," said the Pope.

"Holy Father, David Rossi was a friendless orphan."

"I have heard so," said the Pope.

"He never knew his father--not even by name. His mother was a poor

unhappy woman who had been cruelly deceived by everybody. She drowned

herself in the Tiber."

"Poor soul," said the Pope.

"He was nursed in the Foundling, your Holiness, and brought up in a

straw hut in the Campagna, and then sold as a boy into England."

The Pope moved uneasily in his seat.

"My father found him on the streets of London on a winter's night, your

Holiness, carrying a squirrel and an accordion. He wore a ragged suit of

velveteens which used to be laughed at by the London boys, and that was

all that sheltered his little body from the cold. 'Some poor man's

child,' my father thought. But who can say if it was so, your

Holiness?"




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