Thereafter he hired a bed from the vintner, and slept until close upon noon. Having broken his fast upon a dish of salt herrings, he wandered forth again, errant and aimless. He won through a succession of narrow, unclean alleys into the eastern end of Cheapside, and stood there, aghast to survey the change that the month had wrought. In that thoroughfare, usually the busiest in London, he found emptiness and silence. Where all had been life and bustle, a continual stream of coaches and chairs of wayfarers on foot and on horseback, of merchants and prentices at the shop doors with their incessant cries of “What d’ye lack?” and clamorous invitations to view the wares and bargains that they offered, the street from end to end was now empty of all but some half-dozen stragglers like himself, and one who with averted head was pushing a wheelbarrow whose grim load was covered by a cloak. Not a coach, not a chair, not a horse in sight, and not a merchant’s voice to be heard; not even a beggar’s whine. Here and there a shop stood open, but where there were no buyers there was no eagerness to sell. Some few houses he beheld close-shuttered and padlocked, each marked with the red cross and guarded by its armed watchman; one or two others he observed to stand open and derelict. Last of all, but perhaps most awe-inspiring, as being the most eloquent witness to the general desolation, he saw that blades of grass were sprouting between the kidney stones with which the street was paved, so that, but for those lines of houses standing so grim and silent on either side, he could never have supposed himself to be standing in a city thoroughfare. He turned up towards St. Paul’s, his steps echoing in the noontide through the empty street as echo at midnight the steps of some belated reveller. It were unprofitable further to follow him in those aimless wanderings, in which he spent that day and the days that followed. Once he made an excursion as far as Whitehall, to assure himself that His Grace of Buckingham was, indeed, gone from Town, as Dr. Beamish had informed him. He went spurred by the desire to vent a sense of wrong that came to the surface of his sodden wits like oil to the surface of water. But he found the gates of Wallingford House closed and its windows tight-shuttered, as were by then practically all the windows that overlooked that forsaken courtly thoroughfare. Albemarle, he learnt from a stray sailor with whom he talked, was still at the Cockpit. True to his character, Honest George Monk remained grimly at his post unmoved by danger; indeed, going freely abroad in utter contempt of it, engrossed in the charitable task of doing whatever a man in his position could do to mitigate the general suffering. Holles was tempted to seek him. But the temptation was not very strong upon him, and he withstood it. Such a visit would but waste the time of a man who had no time to waste; therefore, Albemarle was hardly likely to give him a welcome.