In the midst of the sickness Cicely's first baby was born, but mother and child were unaffected by the sickness around, which was in part due to the fact that in his anxiety to keep out all contamination, Sir Miles had banished rushes from the floors of the house, and even the arras was pulled down from the walls of the chamber where Lady Paton lay when her baby came. This was one of the secondary causes; but the chief was doubtless the fact that Cicely had learned to trust in the loving care of God, who ruled her life and that of her husband too.
"For your sake I hope the sickness will not come near me," she said to him one day; "but if it should, I know it will be because our Father in heaven sees that you can work for Him better without me than with me."
"Hush, hush, my darling," said Miles imploringly; and when he was compelled to go out among the plague-stricken people, he would not go near the room where his wife and child lay, until he had changed his clothes and washed himself, in a fashion that few Englishmen did at that time.
By the time the pestilence was over, so many rules as to cleanliness had been adopted at Paton Hall and the surrounding village, that it was scarcely likely that master or peasants would ever quite relapse into the old state of dirt and accumulated filth again, especially when it became known that they had lost fewer people from the pestilence than any other place of a similar population.
They were just recovering from the panic caused by the plague, and had gathered in another plentiful harvest, when Sir Miles received a letter from London, that made him decide to go there later in the year.
Of course Lady Paton and Mistress Margery were taken into the confidence of Sir Miles as to his journey to London, just before Christmas; but the servants and tenants supposed that their master was going to have a little junketing at Court, for they knew the position that Lady Paton's father held, and they were not surprised that their master should go to visit his relatives at Greenwich, or that their mistress should stay at home, seeing she had a young baby to care for.
So Sir Miles and one trusty servant went to London, and took up their quarters at "The Sign of the Golden Fleece."
Here Sir Miles learned that the King had gone to spend his Christmas at Eltham, and so it would be useless to go to Greenwich; and he decided that Thames Street would suit best, for the business that had brought him to London, which, his servant learned, was to watch for the arrival of corn ships from the Low Country.
Sir Miles found the neighbourhood of Thames Street much more cheerful than any other part of the city, although his servant rather despised this neighbourhood of wharves and ships.
His master left him free to do as he liked, and as the curate of All Hallows in Honey Lane seemed to be sufficient attendance for his master, the servant left these two to themselves.