Maria looked puzzled.
‘I am sorry,’ he said, in a tone from which there was no appeal, ‘but I cannot tell you.’
She looked at him a little hardly at first; then she remembered what every one in Rome knew, that the delicate, shadow-like man with the clear brown eyes had risked being tried for murder when he was a young priest rather than betray a confession which had been anything but formal. Her tired face softened as she thought of that.
‘I am sorry I asked you,’ she said. ‘I did not mean to be inquisitive.’
‘It was natural that you should ask the question,’ he answered, ‘but it would not have been quite honourable in me to answer it.’
‘I trust you all the more because you refused me,’ she said. ‘And now I must be going, for I have kept you a long time.’
‘Scarcely a quarter of an hour.’ He smiled as he glanced at the hideous modern clock on the table.
She left him after thanking him and pressing his thin, kindly hand, and she made her way back to the church, feeling a little faint.
When she was gone Monsignor Saracinesca returned to the question of the picture which was to be hung, but for a while he could not give it all the attention that a beautiful Hans Memling deserved. He was thinking of what he had said to Maria, and not only of that, but of what he had said to Baldassare del Castiglione a quarter of an hour earlier.
For that was the coincidence which had brought the two together that morning at the door of the church. Castiglione had taken it into his head to see Don Ippolito on the same day; like Maria, he had telephoned to the palace and had learned that his old acquaintance was usually to be found in the Sacristy about eleven; being a soldier, he had gone punctually at the hour, whereas Maria had not arrived till fifteen or twenty minutes later, and it was therefore almost a certainty that they should meet.