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