special providence must have watched over you, sir," replied the
apprentice, "and I believe yours is the only family in the whole city
that has been so spared. I have reason to be grateful for my own
extraordinary preservation, and yet I would rather it had pleased Heaven
to take me away than leave me to my present misery."

"You keep me in a frightful state of suspense, Leonard," rejoined the
grocer, regarding the packet wistfully, "for I dare not open your
letters till they are thoroughly fumigated. You assure me my child is
living. Has she been attacked by the plague?"

"Would she had!" groaned Leonard.

"Is she still at Ashdown?" pursued the grocer. "Ah! you shake your head.
I see!--I must be beside myself not to have thought of it before. She is
in the power of the Earl of Rochester."

"She is," cried Leonard, catching at the angle of the shed for support.

"And I am here!" exclaimed Mr. Bloundel, forgetting his caution, and
thrusting himself far out of the window, as if with the intention of
letting himself down by the rope--"I am here, when I ought to be near
her!"

"Calm yourself, I beseech you, sir," cried Leonard; "a moment's rashness
will undo all you have done."

"True!" replied the grocer, checking himself. "I must think of others as
well as of her. But where is she? Hide nothing from me."

"I have reason to believe she is in London," replied the apprentice. "I
traced her hither, and should not have desisted from my search if I had
not been checked by the plague, which attacked me on the night of my
arrival. I was taken to the pesthouse near Westbourne Green, where I
have been for the last three weeks."

"If she was brought to London, as you state," rejoined the grocer, "I
cannot doubt but she has fallen a victim to the scourge."

"It may be," replied Leonard, moodily, "and I would almost hope it is
so. When you peruse my letters, you will learn that she was carried off
by the earl from the residence of a lady at Kingston Lisle, whither she
had been removed for safety; and after being taken from place to place,
was at last conveyed to an old hall in the neighbourhood of Oxford,
where she was concealed for nearly a month."

"Answer me, Leonard," cried the grocer, "and do not attempt to deceive
me. Has she preserved her honour?"

"Up to the time of quitting Oxford she had preserved it," replied the
apprentice. "She herself assured me she had resisted all the earl's
importunities, and would die r