The stern door was swung to by one who leaned from the stage. Still through the glass the Cardinal smiled out at his friends and waved his hand. Then a bell struck, a vibration ran through the boat, the stage outside lined with faces suddenly swayed and then fell into space. The Cardinal laid his hand on the priest's knee. "Now let us have a talk," he said. (IV) The air that breathed down from the Alps was beginning to cloud the windows of the cabin before they had finished talking. The man who had lost his memory, under the tremendous stress of an emotion of which he was hardly directly conscious at all--the emotion generated by the knowledge that every whistling mile that fled past brought him nearer an almost certain death--had experienced a kind of sudden collapse of his defences such as he had never contemplated. He had told everything straight out to this quiet, fatherly man--his terrors, his shrinking from the unfamiliar atmosphere of thought to which he had awakened, it seemed, a few months before, his sense that Christianity had lost its spirit, and, above all, the strange absence of any definite religious emotion in himself. He found this difficult to put into words; he had hardly realized it even to himself. The Cardinal put one question. "And yet you are facing death on the understanding that it is all true?" "I suppose so." "Very well, then. That is faith. You need say no more. You have been to confession?" "This afternoon." The old man was silent for a moment. "As to the unreality, the feeling that the Church is heartless, I think that is natural. You had a violent mental shock in your illness. That means that your emotions are very sensitive, almost to the point of morbidness. Well, the heart of the Church is very deep, and you have not found it yet. That does not greatly matter. You must keep your _will_ fixed. That is all that God asks. . . . I think it is true that the Church is hard, in a certain sense; or shall we call it a Divine strength? It is largely a matter of words. She has had that strength always. Once it nerved her to suffer; now it nerves her to rule. But I think you would find that she could suffer again." "Your Eminence!" cried the priest lamentably, "I am beginning to see that. . . . Yourself. . . . Prince Otteone. . . ." The Cardinal lifted his hand. "Of myself we need not speak. I am an old man, and I do not expect to suffer. Prince Otteone was another matter. He was a young man, full of life; and he knew to what he was going. Well, does not his case impress you? He went quite cheerfully, you know." The priest was silent. "What are you thinking of, my son?" The priest shivered a little. "Tell me," said the Cardinal again. "It is the Holy Father," burst out the other impulsively. "He was terrible: so unconcerned, so careless as to who lived or died. . . ." He looked up in an agony, and saw a look almost of amusement in the old man's eyes fixed on him.