Most alarming of all was the news that the Queen-mother had fled with all her people, and most of her treasures, from her palace at Somerset House—for Henrietta Maria was not a woman to fly before a phantom fear. She had seen too much of the stern realities of life to be scared by shadows; and she had neither establishment nor power in France equal to those she left in England. In Paris the daughter of the great Henry was a dependent. In London she was second only to the King; and her Court was more esteemed than Whitehall. “If she has fled, there must be reason for it,” said the newly elected Superior, who boasted of correspondents at Paris, notably a cousin in that famous convent, the Visitandines de Chaillot, founded by Queen Henrietta, and which had ever been a centre of political and religious intrigue, the most fashionable, patrician, exalted, and altogether worldly establishment. Alarmed at this dismal news, Angela wrote urgently to her sister, but with no effect; and the passage of every day, with occasional rumours of an increasing death-rate in London, strengthened her fears, until terror nerved her to a desperate resolve. She would go to London to see her sister; to nurse her if she were sick; to mourn for her if she were dead. The Superior did all she could to oppose this decision, and even asserted authority over the pupil who, since her eighteenth year had been released from discipline, subject but to the lightest laws of the convent. As the great-niece and beloved child of the late Superior she had enjoyed all possible privileges; while the liberal sum annually remitted for her maintenance gave her a certain importance in the house. And now on being told she must not go, her spirit rose against the Superior’s authority. “I recognise no earthly power that can keep me from those I love in their time of peril!” she said. “You do not know that they are in sickness or danger. My last letters from Paris stated that it was only the low people whom the contagion in London was attacking.” “If it was only the low people, why did the Queen-mother leave? If it was safe for my sister to be in London it would have been safe for the Queen.” “Lady Fareham is doubtless in Oxfordshire.” “I have written to Chilton Abbey as well as to Fareham House, and I can get no answer. Indeed, reverend mother, it is time for me to go to those to whom I belong. I never meant to stay in this house after my aunt’s death. I have only been waiting my father’s orders. If all be well with my sister I shall go to the Manor Moat, and wait his commands quietly there. I am home-sick for England.” “You have chosen an ill time for home-sickness, when a pestilence is raging.”