and leaned out of the window.

'Not alone; oh, not alone!' the girl exclaimed. 'And please, please do
not mention me--presently. Hark! do you hear wheels? Your heart must
not beat. Now farewell. You will not be alone: at least, so I think. See
what I wear, dear Mr. Patient!' She drew from her bosom, attached to a
piece of blue ribbon, the half of an English shilling, kissed it, and
blew a soft farewell to me:

She had not been long gone when the Princess Ottilia stood in her place.

A shilling tossed by an English boy to a couple of little foreign girls
in a woodman's hut!--you would not expect it to withstand the common
fate of silver coins, and preserve mysterious virtues by living
celibate, neither multiplying nor reduced, ultimately to play the part
of a powerful magician in bringing the boy grown man to the feet of an
illustrious lady, and her to his side in sickness, treasonably to the
laws of her station. The little women quarrelled over it, and snatched
and hid and contemplated it in secret, each in her turn, until the
strife it engendered was put an end to by a doughty smith, their
mother's brother, who divided it into equal halves, through which he
drove a hole, and the pieces being now thrown out of the currency, each
one wore her share of it in her bosom from that time, proudly appeased.
They were not ordinary peasant children, and happily for them they had
another friend that was not a bird of passage, and was endowed by nature
and position to do the work of an angel. She had them educated to read,
write, and knit, and learn pretty manners, and in good season she took
one of the sisters to wait on her own person. The second went, upon
her recommendation, into the household of a Professor of a neighbouring
University. But neither of them abjured her superstitious belief in the
proved merits of the talisman she wore. So when they saw the careless
giver again they remembered him; their gratitude was as fresh as on that
romantic morning of their childhood, and they resolved without concert
to serve him after their own fashion, and quickly spied a way to it.
They were German girls.

You are now enabled to guess more than was known to Ottilia and me of
the curious agency at work to shuffle us together. The doors of her
suite in the palace were barred against letters addressed to the
princess; the delivery of letters to her was interdicted, she
consenting, yet she found one: it lay on the broad walk of the
ora