unnerving from contrast with the mental tension of the last fortnight.
Then, at the usual hour of examination, the door opened. The usual
attendants were in waiting. "Now for a new trial of wits," thought he,
as he rose to follow them. Then it occurred to him that it might be for
sentence that he was summoned; and while he was weighing the
probabilities, and calling up his strength for the occasion, he reached
the door, the attendants threw it open, and he found himself in the
presence, not of his judges, but of his wife and children. Pale,
bewildered, looking timidly towards him, through eyes dim with tears,
there they stood, utterly at a loss what to say or what to do.

He felt his heart bound. But he saw the snare, and, repressing his
emotions by a powerful effort, held out his hand instead of opening his
arms, and bidding them, cheer up and give themselves no uneasiness about
him, and above all not to let their enemies fancy that either he or they
would be cast down by anything that they could do, he calmly turned to
the guards, and told them, that, if that stale trick was all they had
brought him there for, they had better take him back to his cell.

Meanwhile his friends were not idle: and he had friends, as I have
already hinted, even in the sacred college. With a cardinal on your
side, you may do many things in Rome which it would hardly answer to
venture upon without him; for who can tell but that that Cardinal may
one day be Pope? The precise nature of the accusation lodged against him
M---- never knew; but he had gathered enough from the interrogatories to
feel that he had got lightly off, when he found himself condemned to say
his prayers and read books of devotion three months in a convent, with
the privilege of walking in the garden and talking theology with the
elder brethren.