Leonard took no notice of the remark, but silently crossing the nave of this beautiful subterranean church (part of which still exists), traversed its northern aisle.  At length the verger stopped before the entrance of a small chapel, once dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, but now devoted to a less sacred purpose.  As they advanced, Leonard observed a pile of dried skulls and bones in one corner, a stone coffin, strips of woollen shrouds, fragments of coffins, mattocks, and spades.  It was evidently half a charnel, half a receptacle for the sexton’s tools.

“If you choose to open that door,” said the verger, pointing to one at the lower end of the chamber, “you will find him you seek.  I shall go no further.”

Summoning up all his resolution, Leonard pushed open the door.  A frightful scene met his gaze.  At one side of a deep, low-roofed vault, the architecture of which was of great antiquity, and showed that it had been a place of burial, was stretched a miserable pallet, and upon it, covered by a single blanket, lay a wretch, whose groans and struggles proclaimed the anguish he endured.  A lamp was burning on the floor, and threw a sickly light upon the agonized countenance of the sufferer.  He was a middle-aged man, with features naturally harsh, but which now, contracted by pain, had assumed a revolting expression.  An old crone, who proved to be his mother, and a young man, who held him down in bed by main force, tended him.  He was rambling in a frightful manner; and as his ravings turned upon the most loathly matters, it required some firmness to listen to them.

At a little distance from him, upon a bench, sat a stout, shrewd-looking, but benevolent little personage, somewhat between forty and fifty.  This was Doctor Hodges.  He had a lancet in his hand, with which he had just operated upon the sufferer, and he was in the act of wiping it on a cloth.  As Leonard entered the vault, the doctor observed to the attendants of the sick man, “He will recover.  The tumour has discharged its venom.  Keep him as warm as you can, and do not let him leave his bed for two days.  All depends upon that.  I will send him proper medicines and some blankets shortly.  If he takes cold, it will be fatal.”

The young man promised to attend to the doctor’s injunctions, and the old woman mumbled her thanks.

“Where is Judith Malmayns?” asked Doctor Hodges:  “I am surprised not to see her.  Is she afraid of the distemper?”

“Afraid of it!—­not she,” replied the old woman.  “Since the plague has raged so dreadfully, she has gone out as a nurse to the sick, and my poor son has seen nothing of her.”

Leonard then recollected that he had heard the woman, who called out of the miser’s house, addressed as Mother Malmayns by the coffin-maker, and had no doubt that she was the sexton’s wife.  His entrance having been so noiseless that it passed unnoticed, he now stepped forward, and, addressing Doctor Hodges, acquainted him with his errand.