“God forbid!” answered Dr. Clarke, with a grave smile; “and if you be wise, you will put up the same prayer for yourself.  Woe to those who shall be smitten by this beautiful Lady Eleanore!  But yonder stands the governor, and I have a word or two for his private ear.  Good-night!” He accordingly advanced to Governor Shute and addressed him in so low a tone that none of the bystanders could catch a word of what he said, although the sudden change of His Excellency’s hitherto cheerful visage betokened that the communication could be of no agreeable import.  A very few moments afterward it was announced to the guests that an unforeseen circumstance rendered it necessary to put a premature close to the festival.

The ball at the province-house supplied a topic of conversation for the colonial metropolis for some days after its occurrence, and might still longer have been the general theme, only that a subject of all-engrossing interest thrust it for a time from the public recollection.  This was the appearance of a dreadful epidemic which in that age, and long before and afterward, was wont to slay its hundreds and thousands on both sides of the Atlantic.  On the occasion of which we speak it was distinguished by a peculiar virulence, insomuch that it has left its traces—­its pitmarks, to use an appropriate figure—­on the history of the country, the affairs of which were thrown into confusion by its ravages.  At first, unlike its ordinary course, the disease seemed to confine itself to the higher circles of society, selecting its victims from among the proud, the well-born and the wealthy, entering unabashed into stately chambers and lying down with the slumberers in silken beds.  Some of the most distinguished guests of the province-house—­even those whom the haughty Lady Eleanore Rochcliffe had deemed not unworthy of her favor—­were stricken by this fatal scourge.  It was noticed with an ungenerous bitterness of feeling that the four gentlemen—­the Virginian, the British officer, the young clergyman and the governor’s secretary—­who had been her most devoted attendants on the evening of the ball were the foremost on whom the plague-stroke fell.  But the disease, pursuing its onward progress, soon ceased to be exclusively a prerogative of aristocracy.  Its red brand was no longer conferred like a noble’s star or an order of knighthood.  It threaded its way through the narrow and crooked streets, and entered the low, mean, darksome dwellings and laid its hand of death upon the artisans and laboring classes of the town.  It compelled rich and poor to feel themselves brethren then, and stalking to and fro across the Three Hills with a fierceness which made it almost a new pestilence, there was that mighty conqueror—­that scourge and horror of our forefathers—­the small-pox.