Will told us this news in the morning, and we were grieved at our foolishness, and wondered at hers; but we had little time for lamenting, as we were setting forth to visit a distant kinswoman of our father’s, who, being rich and well reputed, we thought might be able to help us.  But here we fared no better,—­not that the lady was dead; but she had gone out of town on the first alarm of the sickness, leaving her house locked up and empty, as the neighbours told us.  So we went back to our inn yet more cast down; but there we stayed not long, for we were scarce got to our room when the landlord came to us, very angry, and said, had he known we had been visiting an infected house, we had never come into his; and he bade us to pack up and be gone within the hour, that he might have every place purified where we had come.  Our horses, he said, might stand in his stable; but we saying we would remove them, he spoke more plainly, and said he should keep them as security for what we owed.  ‘I will take no money from you,’ he said; ’you may have the Plague in your purses for all I know;’ and he left us, saying if we went not quickly we should be put out by force.

This brutal usage dismayed me; but Althea said, ’Poor wretch! he is half crazed with fear; that makes mean men cruel; care not for him;’ and when we were ready, giving our packages to Will, she led the way out with a determined aspect, having, as I soon found, embraced a strange—­nay, a desperate resolution.  For Will asking her, ’Which way will ye turn now, mistress?  In this street no inn will open to us, for sure;’ she replied,—­

’We will not seek any inn; we will betake ourselves to our cousin’s empty house.’

‘You mean not Mr. Dacre’s?’ I cried.

‘But I do,’ said she.  ’We have a right to shelter there; and the door is open.’

I exclaimed against this as a tempting of Providence, persuading her first to try some other house of entertainment; and at last she agreed.  Now, whether our great distraction of mind gave us a haggard and sickly aspect, or whether ’twas merely the suspicion and hardness of heart bred in all people by terror, I cannot tell; but no one would take us in, some saying flatly they would receive no lodgers they did not know, and know to be sound.  The day wearing fast away in these vain applications, Althea says to me,—­

’You see we must try my plan at last.  I bid you think scorn, my Lucy, of yielding to such base fears as make folk turn us from their doors.’

‘It is not that I fear infection as they do,’ said I; ’but I shrink from dwelling in a house not our own, and lying open to any thief.’

‘Baby fears, Lucy,’ she said, smiling.  ’We will do our cousins a better turn than they merit; we will keep their doors fast against thieves, and their household stuff from moth and mould and rust.  For the infection, we run as little risk in that house as out of it.’  So she bore me down with her will, the more easily since we had no choice but either to lodge in that house or in the open street.