“Then God will absolve me if I kill you. Die, like a villain, of whom I clear the world, a sacrilegious bandit, a dog!”
He fired on Gilbert, who fell in the smoke as if by lightning. Philip felt the sand at his feet fall in from being wet with blood. He lost his reason and rushed from the grotto.
When he ran upon the strand the last boat was waiting. He made its tally right, and no one questioned him.
It was not till the subsequent day that Paul Jones noticed that a passenger was missing.
CHAPTER XLIII.
THE LAST ABSOLUTE KING.
AT eight at night, on the ninth day of May, 1774, Versailles presented the most curious and interesting of sights.
Since the first day of the month, Louis XV., stricken with a sickness of which the physicians dared not at the outset reveal the gravity, had kept his bed, and began look around him for truth or hope.
Two head physicians sided with the Dauphin and Dubarry severally; one said that the truth would kill the patient, and the other that he ought to know so as to make a Christian end.
But to call in Religion was to expel the favorite. When the Church comes in at one door, Satan must fly out of the other.
While all the parties were wrangling, the disease easily rooted itself in the old, debauched body and so strengthened itself that medicine was not to put it to rout.