my tears poured down upon it.

* * * * *

As I passed back again through the door to where Mr. Huddleston was
waiting for me, I heard the doors at the further end of the chamber
unlatched and the footsteps of the folks--physicians, courtiers, Bishops
and the rest--that poured in to see the end.

EPILOGUE

I have said again and again how strange this or that moment or incident
appeared to me as I experienced it; yet as I sit here now in my cell,
thirty years later, looking out upon the cloister-garth with its twisted
columns, and the cypresses and the grass, it is not so much this or that
thing that appears to me strange, but the whole of my experiences and
indeed human life altogether. For what can be more extraordinary than a
life which began as mine did, when I first went to England in sixteen
hundred and seventy-eight, should be ending as mine will end presently,
if God will, as a monk of St. Paul's-Without-the-Walls, in Holy Rome? To
what purpose, I ask myself, was that part of my life designed by Divine
Providence? For what did I labour so long, when all was to come to
nothing? For what was I to learn the passion of human love; if but to
lose it again? For what was I to intrigue and spy and labour and
adventure my life, for the cause of England and the Catholic Church,
when all a year or two later was to fall back, and further than it had
ever fallen before, into the darkness of heresy? There is but one effort
in all those years of which I saw the fruition, and that was the
conversion of my master upon his deathbed.

However, I have not yet related what passed after I had gone from the
King again, and took Mr. Huddleston downstairs. I will relate that very
shortly; and make an end. I had it all from Mr. Chiffinch before I left
London.

* * * * *

His Majesty, after we were gone from him, rallied a little, in so far as
to make some think that he would recover altogether; but the physicians
said No; and they were right for near the first time in all their
diagnosis of his state. But they continued to give him their remedies of
Sal Ammoniac and Peruvian Bark, and later the Oriental Bezoar Stone,
which is a pebble, I understand, taken from the stomach of a goat. Also
they blooded him again, twelve ounces more, and all to no purpose.

His Majesty said a number of things that night that were very
characteristic of him; for God gave him back h