When he was serving as a youth at the English Court, one evening he was with his companions in his lodging, when the queen called him into her chamber. He found the place full of lepers, and the queen standing in the midst, with her robe laid aside and a towel girt round her. Having filled a basin with water, she proceeded to wash the feet of the lepers and to wipe them with the towel, and then taking them in both her hands, she kissed them with devotion. To whom her brother: “What dost thou, my lady? Certes if the king were to know this, never would he deign to kiss with his lips that mouth of thine polluted with the soil of leprous feet.” But she answered with a smile: “Who does not know that the feet of an Eternal King are to be preferred to the lips of a mortal king? See, then, dearest brother, wherefore I have called thee, that thou mayest learn by my example to do so also. Take the basin, and do what thou hast seen me do.” “At this,” said David, narrating to the abbot, “I was sore afraid, and answered that I could on no account endure it. For as yet I did not know the Lord, nor had His Spirit been revealed to me. And as she proceeded with her task, I laughed--_mea culpa_--and returned to my comrades[162].” The example of his sister, however, was not lost upon him; for when he acquired the earldom and manor of Huntingdon, and so became an opulent English noble, he founded a leper-hospital there. Aelred sees him in Abraham’s bosom with Lazarus. The meaning of all this devotion to lepers is shown in the name which Aelred applies to them--_pauperes Christi_. In washing their feet the pious Matilda was in effect washing the feet of an Eternal King; and that, in her estimation, was better than kissing the lips of a mortal king.