SON CHRISTOPHER.
AN HISTORIETTE. BY HARRIET MARTINEAU.
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CHAPTER IX. A PORTENTOUS SUMMER NIGHT.
The setting sun was shining full upon the glorious west front of Winchester Cathedral when Madam Lisle and a young lady came slowly up the ascent from the Matrons’ College, where they had been visiting some of the inmates. Most of the clergymen’s widows who had found an asylum there knew the Lady Alice very well, though she was not of their communion. The whole city know her, as these ladies did, by her conduct nearly twenty years before, when she had remained to nurse the sick in the plague, after the other gentry had gone away. Few places had suffered so much as Winchester; and some people said that nobody would have been left alive but for Lady Alice. They were never tired of telling what things she did, and how she did them; and children, whose parents were children when the thing happened, knew as much as if they had seen that terrible summer. Whenever she passed through the streets, on her way to the Matrons’ College, or elsewhere, the youngest brat, playing in the gutter, made his reverence,—the girls ran right in front to drop their curtseys; and their parents came to their doors on this bright summer evening to see the beloved old lady go by.
