ast 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 eith