Without deliberate disobedience to her husband, Lady Fareham made the best use of her time during his absence in Paris. The public theatres had not yet re-opened after the horror of the plague. Whitehall was a desert, the King and his chief following being at Tunbridge. It was the dullest season of the year, and the recrudescence of the contagion in the low-lying towns along the Thames—Deptford, Greenwich, and the neighbourhood—together with some isolated cases in London, made people more serious than usual, despite of the so-called victory over the Dutch, which, although a mixed benefit, was celebrated piously by a day of General Thanksgiving. Hyacinth, disgusted at the dulness of the town, was for ordering her coaches and retiring to Chilton. “It is mortal dull at the Abbey,” she said, “but at least we have the hawks, and breezy hills to ride over, instead of this sickly city atmosphere, which to my nostrils smells of the pestilence.” Henri de Malfort argued against such a retreat. “It were a deliberate suicide,” he said. “London, when everybody has left—all the bodies we count worthy to live, _par exemple_—is a more delightful place than you can imagine. There are a host of vulgar amusements which you would not dare to visit when your friends are in town; and which are ten times as amusing as the pleasures you know by heart. Have you ever been to the Bear Garden? I’ll warrant you no, though ’tis but across the river at Bankside. We’ll go there this afternoon, if you like, and see how the common people taste life. Then there are the gardens at Islington. There are mountebanks, and palmists, and fortune-tellers, who will frighten you out of your wits for a shilling. There’s a man at Clerkenwell, a jeweller’s journeyman from Venice, who pretends to practise the transmutation of metals, and to make gold. He squeezed hundreds out of that old miser Denham, who was afraid to have the law of him for imposture, lest all London should laugh at his own credulity and applaud the cheat. And you have not seen the Italian puppet-play, which is vastly entertaining. I could find you novelty and amusement for a month.” “Find anything new, even if it fail to amuse me. I am sick of everything I know.” “And then there is our midnight party at Millbank, the ghost-party, at which you are to frighten your dearest friends out of their poor little wits.” “Most of my dearest friends are in the country.” “Nay, there is Lady Lucretia Topham, whom I know you hate; and Lady Sarah and the Dubbins are still in Covent Garden.” “I will have no Dubbin—a toping wretch—and she is a too incongruous mixture, with her Edinburgh lingo and her Whitehall arrogance. Besides, the whole notion of a mock ghost was vulgarised by Wilmot’s foolery, who ought to have been born a saltimbanque, and spent his life in a fair. No, I have abandoned the scheme.”