Oh, you who saw her, as I did, in her young and innocent years, can you read this without shuddering? Can you think on it without weeping? As her fall was sudden, so was the change it wrought. With it vanished affections, hopes, womanly feelings, memory of the past; nay, methinks therein I err. Memory did yet abide, but linked with hatred; Satan's memory of heaven. From depths to depths she hath sunk, and is now wedded to a mean wretch, the gaoler of her old prison. So rank a hatred hath grown in her against recusants and mostly priests, that it rages like a madness in her soul, which thirsts for their blood. Some months back, about the time I did begin to write this history, news reached me that she had sold the life of that meek saint, that sweet poet, Father Southwell, of which even an enemy, Lord Mountjoy, did say, when he had seen him suffer, "I pray God, where that man's soul now is, mine may one day be." Her father had concealed him in that house where she had dwelt in her innocent days. None but the family knew the secret of its hiding-place. She did reveal it, and took gold for her wages! What shall be that woman's death-bed? What trace doth remain on her soul of what was once a share in the divine nature? May one of God's ministers be nigh unto her in that hour for to bid her not despair! If Judas had repented, Jesus would have pardoned him. Peradventure, misery without hope of relief overthrew her brain. I do pray for her always. 'Tis a vain thought perhaps, but I sometimes wish I might, though I see not how to compass it, yet once speak with her before she or I die. Methinks I could say such words as should touch some old chord in her dead heart. God knoweth! That day I write of, little did I ween what her end would be. But yet it feared me to hear one so young and of so frail an aspect speak so boastfully; and it seemed even then to my inexperienced mind, that my Lady Surrey, who had so humbly erewhile accused herself of cowardice and lamented her weakness, should be in a safer plight, albeit as yet unreconciled.