Hastening her footsteps after the horror of that encounter, she went by Ludgate Hill to the great cathedral, keeping carefully to the middle of the street, and glancing at the walls and shuttered casements on either side of her, recalling that appalling story which the Italian choir-mistress at the Ursulines had told her of the great plague in Milan—how one morning the walls and doors of many houses in the city had been found smeared with some foul substance, in broad streaks of white and yellow, which was believed to be a poisonous compost carrying contagion to every creature who touched or went within the influence of its mephitic odour; how this thing had happened not once, but many times; until the Milanese believed that Satan himself was the prime mover in this horror, and that there were a company of wretches who had sold themselves to the devil, and were his servants and agents, spreading disease and death through the city. Strange tales were told of those who had seen the foul fiend face to face, and had refused his proffered gold. Innocent men were denounced, and but narrowly escaped being torn limb from limb, or trampled to death, under the suspicion of being concerned in this anointing of the walls, and even the cathedral benches, with plague-poison; yet no death, that the nun could remember, had ever been traced directly to the compost. It was a mysterious terror which struck deep into the hearts of a frightened people, so that at last, against his better reason, and at the repeated prayer of his flock, the good Archbishop allowed the crystal coffin of St. Carlo Borromeo to be carried in solemn procession, upon the shoulders of Cardinals, from end to end of the city—on which occasion all Milan crowded into the streets, and clustered thick on either side of the pompous train of monks and incense-bearers, priests and acolytes. But soon there fell a deeper despair upon the inhabitants of the doomed city; for within two days after this solemn carrying of the saintly remains the death-rate had tripled and there was scarce a house in which the contagion had not entered. Then it was said that the anointers had been in active work in the midst of the crowd, and had been busiest in the public squares where the bearers of the crystal coffin halted for a space with their sacred load, and where the people clustered thickest. The Archbishop had foreseen the danger of this gathering of the people, many but just recovering from the disease, many infected and unconscious of their state; but his flock saw only the handiwork of the fiend in this increase of evil. In Protestant London there had been less inclination to superstition; yet even here a comet which, under ordinary circumstances, would have appeared but as other comets, was thought to wear the shape of a fiery sword stretched over the city in awful threatening.