Then the most outrageous stories were circulated about Mr. Cheriton. He was a drunkard and a gambler. He had half a dozen low intrigues on his hands with girls who came to his classes. He used his influence for the worst purposes, and had been thrashed by the father of one of his victims. We heard plenty of this sort of stuff, for Mrs. Thorpe's shop continued to be a rendezvous for all the fine people, notwithstanding her audacious conduct in taking in the poor preacher's wife. Mrs. Cropsey, who disapproved vehemently of Mr. Cheriton's course for no particular reason except that Mr. Cropsey had never done so, tried her best to induce us to go with her to St. Nicholas' Church, where the congregation were certainly not disturbed by any extra earnestness on the part of the preacher. But we liked Mr. Cheriton too well to leave him. We had taken to spending an hour, two or three days in the week, in the school. The old dame, who had been half blind and more than half deaf for a dozen years, had been persuaded to retire on a pension, paid out of Mr. Cheriton's own pocket, and a new mistress had been found in the person of a widowed sister of Mrs. Bunnell, Lady Throckmorton's humble companion. She was a woman of good education, and certainly made a great change in the parish school. The little maids really learned to read, to sew, and to spin, to keep themselves neat, and behave nicely in the church and in the street. It was even proposed to teach them to write, but such an outcry was made at this daring innovation * that the matter was dropped for the present. * See Mrs. Hannah More's Letters. I had a knitting class, and Amabel undertook to instruct some of the elder and more promising girls in fine work of various sorts, that they might be prepared to take places as nursery and dressing-maids. Mr. Cheriton never came to the school while we were there, and, indeed, we saw much less of him than formerly. He was kept very busy and so were we, and I suppose a feeling of delicacy on his part might have had something to do with it. I had seen from the first how greatly he was taken with Amabel, and I presume he thought it would not be honorable for him to try to engage her affections in the absence of any of her relatives. It was about the first of October, when a letter came from London with sad news. Amabel's step-mother was dead of a fever, taken it was supposed in court whither she had gone with several other fine ladies, to hear sentence pronounced upon a famous highwayman, who had been a terror to all travelers on the North Road for years. It seemed that several of the prisoners brought to the bar at the same time, were suffering from jail fever, and the infection spread to a number of the court officials and spectators, notwithstanding the sweet herbs placed, before them, to ward off such dangers. * Poor Lady Leighton carried the dreadful disease home to her little son, and the two died on the same day.