is cunning knave, with a view to adding
importance to the cure he was come to effect, and which in reality
presented no alarming difficulty, shook his head with ominous gravity,
and whilst promising to do "all that his skill permitted," he spoke of a
clergyman to help Gregory make his peace with God. For the leech had no
cause to suspect that the whole of the Sacred College might have found
the task beyond its powers.

A wild fear took Gregory in its grip. How could he die with such a load
as that which he now carried upon his soul? And the leech, seeing how
the matter preyed upon his patient's mind, made shift--but too late--to
tranquillize him with assurances that he was not really like to die, and
that he had but mentioned a parson so that Gregory in any case should be
prepared.

The storm once raised, however, was not so easily to be allayed, and the
conviction remained with Gregory that his sands were well-nigh run, and
that the end could be but a matter of days in coming.

Realizing as he did how richly he had earned damnation, a frantic terror
was upon him, and all that day he tossed and turned, now blaspheming,
now praying, now weeping. His life had been indeed one protracted course
of wrong-doing, and many had suffered by Gregory's evil ways--many a man
and many a woman. But as the stars pale and fade when the sun mounts the
sky, so too were the lesser wrongs that marked his earthly pilgrimage of
sin rendered pale or blotted into insignificance by the greater wrong
he had done Ronald Marleigh--a wrong which was not ended yet, but whose
completion Joseph was even then working to effect. If only he could save
Crispin even now in the eleventh hour; if by some means he could warn
him not to repair to the sign of the Anchor in Thames Street. His
disordered mind took no account of the fact that in the time that was
sped since Galliard's departure, the knight should already have reached
London.

And so it came about that, consumed at once by the desire to make
confession to whomsoever it might be, and the wish to attempt yet to
avert the crowning evil of whose planning he was partly guilty inasmuch
as he had tacitly consented to Joseph's schemes, Gregory called for his
daughter. She came readily enough, hoping for exactly that which was
about to take place, yet fearing sorely that her hopes would suffer
frustration, and that she would learn nothing from her father.

"Cynthia," he cried, in mingled dread and sorro