I may remain then?"

There came a knock on the inner side of the further door; and he tore
himself free again. But I was after him, and seized him once more.

"I may remain?"

"Yes, yes," he snapped, "as you will! Let me go, sir." He whisked
himself out of my hold, and went swiftly up the stairs and through the
door, shutting it behind him, giving me but the smallest glimpse of a
vast candle-lit room and men's heads all together and the curtains of a
great bed near the door. But I was content: I had got my way.

* * * * *

As I walked up and down the antechamber, very softly, on tip-toe, it
appeared to me that I was, as it were, two persons in one. On the one
side there was the conviction and the determination that, come what
would, I must get a priest to the King if he took a turn at all for the
worse--since, for the present, I believed Mr. Chiffinch's word that His
Majesty was not actually dying. (This was not at all what the physicians
thought at that time; but I did not know that.) This conviction, I
suppose, had always been with me that it was for this that in God's
Providence I had been sent to England; at least, seven in the moment
that I had left my house and run down the gallery, there it was, all
full-formed and mature. As to how it was to be done I had no idea at
all; yet that it would be done I had no doubt. On the other side,
however, every faculty of observation that I had, was alert and
tight-stretched. I remember the very pattern of the carpet I walked on;
the pictures on the walls; and the carving on the presses. Above all I
remember the little door in the corner of the chamber--the third; and
how I opened it, and peeped down the winding staircase that led from it.
(I did not know then what part that little door and winding staircase
was to play in my great design!) Now and again I looked out of the
single window at the river beneath in the early morning sunshine; now I
paced the floor again. It seemed to me that I had found a very pretty
post of observation, as this appeared a very private little room, and
that I should not be troubled here. The great anterooms, I knew, where
the company would be, must lie on the further side of the bedchamber.

I suppose it would be about five minutes after Mr. Chiffinch had left me
that Her Majesty came. The first I knew of it was a great murmur of
voices and footsteps without the door. I went to the door and pulled it
a little op