Roma made a cry of joy, and the Pope raised a warning finger.
"Ah, you must never think of that, my child—you must never think of it. It is a pity, a great pity, but, alas! it cannot be otherwise now. If your husband is to come back, his name must be kept clean and unblemished, and you can never rejoin him whatever happens."
Dizzy with a sense of the Pope's awful error, Roma turned away her face.
"But if you tell me that what you did was due to the compulsion that was put upon you to denounce David Rossi, he must come forward, whatever the consequences, to defend you and plead for you. He must say to the world and to your judges: 'It is true that this poor lady has committed a crime—an awful crime, such as shuts the guilty one out of the fold of the human family—but she was provoked to it by a falsehood. The dead man deceived her. He was her betrayer, her assassin, for he tried to slay her soul. Therefore you will have mercy upon her as you hope for mercy, you will forgive her as you hope for forgiveness, and in the peace and penance of some holy convent she will wipe out the past of her unhappy life as Mary wiped out her sins in the tears with which she washed her Master's feet.'"
He had risen in the exaltation of his emotion, and raised one hand over his head, but Roma, in the toils of the terrible error, had dropped to her knees at his feet.
"Oh, I cannot die with a lie on my lips. Holy Father, let me make my confession."
A vague foreshadowing of the coming revelation seemed to light on the Pope, and he sat down again without a word. Mechanically he prepared to receive the penitent into the Church, questioning her, instructing her, calling on her to repeat the profession of faith, and finally baptizing her conditionally.
"Baptism wipes out all your sins, my daughter," he said, "but if for your soul's comfort you wish to make a full confession before I give you the Blessed Sacrament...."
"I do. I have wished it ever since the end of my trial, and that was why I asked for Father Pifferi."
"Then take care—accuse nobody else, my daughter."