"Ah! here's Eufemio," exclaimed the Cardinal, quivering with anxiety.

"We shall know now, we shall know now." The secretary had plunged into the doorway below, and he climbed the stairs with such rapidity that almost immediately afterwards Pierre saw him rush breathlessly across the waiting-room, and vanish into the Cardinal's sanctum.

Sanguinetti had quitted the balcony to meet his messenger, but soon afterwards he returned to it asking questions, venting exclamations, raising, in fact, quite a tumult over the news which he had received.

"And so it's really true, the night was a bad one.
His Holiness scarcely slept! Colic, you were told?
But nothing could be worse at his age; it might carry him off in a couple of hours.

And the doctors, what do they say ?" The answer did not reach Pierre, but he understood its purport as the Cardinal in his naturally loud voice resumed: "Oh! the doctors never know.