Scarce, however, was the royal banquet closed, when the voice of lamentation was heard in every house, though the mourners went not about the streets; for the living feared to follow their dead to the sepulchre. The angel of death breathed upon the land; he stretched out his wings and covered it--at his breath the land sickened--beneath the shadow of his wings the people perished. The green fields became as a wilderness, and death and desolation reigned in the market-places. Along the streets moved cavalcades of the dead--the hearse of the noble and the car of the citizen; and the dead bodies of the poor were picked up upon the streets! The churchyards rose as hills, and fields were turned up for the dead! The husband fled from his dying wife; the mother feared to kiss her own child; and the bridegroom turned in terror from her who was to have been his bride upon the morn. There was no cry heard but "The dead!--the dead!" The plague walked in silence, sweeping its millions from the earth, laughing at the noisy slaughter of the sword, making kings to tremble, and trampling upon conquerors as dust. Such was the state of London, when Sir William Montague and Sir John Aubrey arrived from France. In every street they met the long trains of the dead being borne to their grave; but the living had deserted them; and, if they met an occasional passenger, fear and paleness were upon his face. They hurried along the streets in silence--for each would have concealed his thoughts from the other--but the thoughts of both were of Madeline; and the one trembled lest he should find his betrothed, the other his sister, with the dead! They proceeded to the house of the Duchess of Salisbury; but they were told that she had fled, to seek a place of refuge from the destroying glance of the pestilence. From the domestics, however, they learned that Madeline had ceased to be the companion of the duchess; but they were also directed where they would find her, with a friend in the city--if she yet lived! But, added their informants, they had heard that, in the street which they named, the inhabitants died faster than the living could bury them. When the haughty Joan became the acknowledged favourite of the king, she was no longer a meet friend or protector to the gentle Madeline; and the latter had taken up her residence in the house of a merchant, who, in his youth, had fought by her father's side; and where, if she enjoyed not the splendour and the luxuries of wealth, neither was she clothed with the trappings of shame. With anxious steps the betrothed husband and the brother hastened to the dwelling of the merchant. They reached it. "Doth Madeline Aubrey reside here?" inquired they in the same breath. "Does she live?--does she live?"