But she was frowning as she looked at him scrutinizingly with her round blue eyes. Her mind was shifted by his light words to her own more immediate concerns. He had met a friend--an old friend. Not much in that to arouse anxiety, perhaps. But Mrs. Quinn moved now in constant dread of influences that might set the Colonel on a sound worldly footing likely to emancipate him from his dependence upon herself. She had skilfully drawn from him enough of the details of his interview with Albemarle to realize that the help upon which he counted from that quarter had not been forthcoming. He had been put off with vague promises, and Mrs. Quinn knew enough of her world not to be greatly perturbed by that. None the less she would have set all doubts at rest by leading the Colonel into the relationship in which she desired to hold him, but that as yet the Colonel manifested no clear disposition to be led. And she was too crafty a huntress to scare her quarry by premature and too direct an onslaught. The only anxiety, yielding to which she might have committed that imprudence, was on the score of the unexpected. She knew that the unexpected will sometimes happen, and this mention of a friend--an old friend, with whom he had spent some hours in intimate talk--was disquieting. She would have liked to question him on the subject of that friend, and might have done so but for his insistent repetition of the question: “What is this news?” Recalled to it thus, the gravity of the news itself thrust out the other matter from her mind. “That the plague has broken out in the City itself--in a house in Bearbinder Lane. It was brought by a Frenchman from Long Acre, where he lived, and which he left upon finding the pestilence to be growing in his neighbourhood. Yet it seems he was already taken with the disease, which now the wretch has brought to our threshold, as it were, without benefit to himself.” The Colonel thought of Tucker and his scaremongering emissaries. “Perhaps it is not true,” said he. “Aye, but it is. Beyond a doubt. It was put about by a preacher rogue from the steps of Paul’s to-day. At first folk did not believe him. But they went to Bearbinder Lane, and there found the house shut up, and guarded by command of my Lord Mayor. And they do say that Sir John Lawrence is gone to Whitehall to take order about this, to concert measures for staying the spread of the pestilence; they are to close playhouses and all other places where people come together, which will likely mean that they will be closing taverns and eating-houses. And what should I do in that case?” “Nay, nay,” Holles comforted her. “It will hardly come to that. Men must eat and drink or they starve, and that’s as bad as the pestilence.”