, and
speaking in the hectoring voice of the birkie student. She threw a
silver coin on the table with a princely air that suited but
indifferently with the sober fashion of her maiden's dress. And among
the mutchkins on the ribbed and rimmed deal table, she squared herself
to write in the name upon her free pardon.

She set her pen to the parchment bravely. Then she stopped, took a long
breath and held it, as though it were the dying breath of one
well-beloved which she had in her keeping. With sudden access of resolve
she began a bold initial. She changed it. Then she wrote again hastily
with a set face, but holding her hand over the writing, as though to
shield the words from sight. Which being done, she looked at what she
had written with a blanched and terror-stricken countenance.

No sooner was the ink dry, than bending again to the paper, she began
eagerly to scrape at it with her finger-nail, as though she would even
yet change her thought.

But as she rubbed the parchment, which was very fine and soft, part of
it curled up at the edge into a tiny roll like a shaving of bark when
one cuts a white birch. Instantly Maisie discerned that there were two
parchments instead of one.

With a light and cunning hand she separated them carefully. They had
been secretly attached so as to look like one. Casting her eyes rapidly
over the second parchment, her heart leaped within her to find that it
was another pardon, the duplicate of the first, and, like it, duly
signed and sealed. It was a moment's work to write in the other name
upon this great discovery. Then throwing, in her joy, a gold piece upon
the table beside the shilling, she mounted at the stance, and rode away
in the direction of the capital.

"My word!" said the good wife of the change-house, gazing after her,
"but that madam doesna want confidence. I doot she will be after no
good!"

"She doesna want siller," quoth her husband, gathering up the money,
"and that's a deal more to the point in a change-house!"

But Maisie Lennox has never told to any--not even to me, who have some
right to know her secrets--that name which she first wrote when she had
to choose between her father's life and her lover's.

She only says, "Let every maid answer in her own heart which name she
would have written, being in my place, that day in the change-house!"

And even so may I leave it to all the maidens that may read my history
to let their hearts answer which. For the