She was gone, and Angela felt strangely alone. Her contemporaries, the chosen friend who had been to her almost as a sister, the girls by whose side she had sat in class, had all left the convent. At twenty-one years of age, she seemed to belong to a former generation; most of the pupils had finished their education at seventeen or eighteen, and had returned to their homes in Flanders, France, or England. There had been several English pupils, for Louvain and Douai had for a century been the seminaries for English Romanists. The pupils of to-day were Angela’s juniors, with whom she had nothing in common, except to teach English to a class of small Flemings, who were almost unteachable. She had heard no more from her father, and knew not where or with whom he might have cast in his lot. She wrote to him under cover to her sister; but of late Hyacinth’s letters had been rare and brief, only long enough, indeed, to apologise for their brevity. Lady Fareham had been in London or at Hampton Court from the beginning of the previous winter. There was talk of the plague having come to London from Amsterdam, that the Privy Council was sitting at Sion House, instead of in London, that the judges had removed to Windsor, and that the Court might speedily remove to Salisbury or Oxford. “And if the Court goes to Oxford, we shall go to Chilton,” wrote Hyacinth; and that was the last of her communications. July passed without news from father or sister; and Angela grew daily more uneasy about both. The great horror of the plague was in the air. It had been raging in Amsterdam in the previous summer and autumn, and a nun had brought the disease to Louvain, where she might have died in the convent infirmary but for Angela’s devoted attention. She had assisted the over-worked infirmarian at a time of unusual sickness—for there was a good deal of illness among the nuns and pupils that summer—mostly engendered of the fear lest the pestilence in Holland should reach Flanders. Doctor and infirmarian had alike praised the girl’s quiet courage, and her instinct for doing the right thing. Remembering all the nun had told of the horrors of Amsterdam, Angela awaited with fear and trembling for news from London; and as the summer wore on, every news-letter that reached the Ursulines brought tidings of increasing sickness in the great prosperous city, which was being gradually deserted by all who could afford to travel. The Court had moved first to Hampton Court, in June, and later to Salisbury, where again the French Ambassador’s people reported strange horrors—corpses found lying in the street hard by their lodgings—the King’s servants sickening. The air of the cathedral city was tainted—though deaths had been few as compared with London, which was becoming one vast lazar-house—and it was thought the Court and Ambassadors would remove themselves to Oxford, where Parliament was to assemble in the autumn, instead of at Westminster.