"More than I deserve, your Holiness."
"You have suffered, my son. But, in the providence of God, who knows what may happen yet? Don't lose heart. Take an old man's word for it—life is worth living. The Holy Father has found it so in spite of many sorrows."
A kind of pitying smile passed over the young man's miserable face. "Mine is a sorrow your Holiness can know nothing about—I have lost my wife," he said.
There was a moment of silence. Then the Pope said in a voice that shook slightly, "You don't mean that your wife is dead, but only...."
"Only," said Rossi, with a curl of the lip, "that it was she who betrayed me."
"It's hard, my son, very hard. But who knows what influences...."
"Curse them! Curse the influences, whatever they were, which caused a wife to betray her husband."
The Pope, who was sitting with both hands on the knob of his stick, quivered perceptibly. "My son," he said, "you have much to justify you, and it is not for me to gainsay you altogether. But God rules His world in righteousness, and if this had not happened, who knows but what worse might have befallen you?"
"Nothing worse could have befallen me, your Holiness."
There was another moment of silence, and then the Pope said, "Yes, I understand what it is to build one's faith on a human foundation. The foundation fails, and then the heart sinks, the soul totters. But bad as this ... this betrayal is, you do very wrong if you refuse to see that it saved you from the consequences—the awful consequences before God and man—of your intended conduct."