In March he was struggling against his failing body’s fatigue to draw. He also started a short story _The Celestial Lover_, for which he was making a coloured picture; for he had bought a paint-box. March turned cold, and Beardsley had a serious set-back. The doctor pursed a serious lip over his promise to let him go up to town--to Beardsley’s bitter disappointment. The doctor now urged a move to the South--if only even to Brittany. Beardsley began to realise that the shadows in his room were again haunted; “I fancy I can count my life by months now.” Yet a day or two later, “Such blessed weather to-day, trees in all directions are putting forth leaves.” Then March went out with cold winds, and bleeding began again, flinging back the poor distracted fellow amongst the terrors. He wrote from his bed and in pencil: “Oh how tired I am of hearing my lung creak all day, like a badly made pair of boots.... I think of the past winter and autumn with unrelieved bitterness.” The move to London for the South was at last decided upon, for the first week in April--to the South of France by easy stages. He knew now that he could never be cured, but he hoped that the ravages of the disease could be prevented from becoming rapid. On the 30th of March in a letter to his friend John Gray, now even more eager to win him to the Church of Rome, he pleads that he ought to have the right to beg for a few months more of life--“Don’t think me foolish to haggle about a few months”--as he has two or three pictured short stories he wants to bring out; but on the following day, Wednesday the 31st of March 1897, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church--on the Friday after, the 2nd of April, he took the Sacrament which had to be brought to him, to his great grief, since he could not go to the Church. He was to be a Roman Catholic for near upon a twelvemonth. From this day of his entering the Church of Rome he wrote to John Gray as “My dear brother.”