Dinah explained their sudden appearance, and asked if they could be of any service.  The old lady gazed at them all in turn, and her face relaxed as she broke into rather a grim laugh.

“Plague nurses, by all the powers!  Certes, this is very pretty company!  If all that is said be true, ye be the worst harpies of all.  I had better have my own minions to rob me than be left to your tender mercies.  Three of you, too!  Verily, ’wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together,’” and the patient laughed again, as though tickled at her own grim pleasantry.

Dorcas would have expostulated and explained and apologized, but her mistress cut her short with a sharp tap of her fan.

“Little fool, hold thy peace! as though I didn’t know an honest face when I see it!

“Come, good people, look me well over, and you’ll soon see I have none of the tokens.  It is but a colic, such as I am well used to at this season of the year; but in these days let a body’s finger but ache, and all the world runs helter skelter this way and that, calling out, ‘The plague! the plague!’ The plague, forsooth! as though I had not lived through a score of such scares of plague.  If men would but listen to me, there need never be any more plagues in London.  But the fools will not hear wisdom.”

“What is your remedy, madam?” asked Dinah, who saw very clearly that the old lady had gauged her symptoms aright; and although she had alarmed her attendants by a partial collapse an hour before, was mending now, and had no symptom of the distemper upon her.

“My remedy is too simple for fools.  Fill up every well in London—­which is just a poison trap—­and drink only New River water, and make every house draw its supply from thence, and we shall soon cease to hear of the plague!  That’s my remedy; but when I tell men so, they gibe and jeer and call me fool for my pains.  Fools every one of them!  If it would only please Providence to burn their city about their ears and fill up all the old wells with the rubbish, you would soon see an end of these scares of plague.  Tush! if men will drink rank poison they deserve to have the plague—­that is all I have to say to them.”

Such an idea as this was certainly far in advance of the times, and it was small wonder that Lady Scrope found no serious listeners when she propounded her scheme.  Dinah did not profess to have an opinion on such a wide question.  Her duties were with the sick.  Others must seek for the cause of the outbreak.  That was not the province of women.

Something in her way of moving about and performing her little offices pleased the fancy of the capricious old woman, as did also the aspect of the two girls, who were assisting Dorcas to set the room to rights after the confusion of the morning, when the mistress had suddenly been taken with a violent colic, which had turned her blue and rigid, and had convinced her household that she was taken for death, and that by a seizure of the prevailing malady.