ng my escape,
he will write my letters to you. Well, sir, let us hear what you have
made of it."

Wogan dictated a most beautiful letter, in which a mother's claims for
obedience were strongly set out--as a justification, one must suppose,
for a daughter's disobedience. But Clementina was betrothed to his
Majesty King James, and that engagement must be ever the highest
consideration with her, on pain of forfeiting her honour. It was
altogether a noble and stately letter, written in formal, irreproachable
phrases which no daughter in the world would ever have written to a
mother. Clementina laughed over it, but said that it would serve. Wogan
looked at his watch again. It was then a quarter to ten.

"Quick!" said he. "Your Highness will wait for me under the fourth tree
of the avenue, counting from the end."

He left the mother and daughter alone, that his presence might not check
the tenderness of their farewell, and went down the stairs into the dark
hall. M. Chateaudoux was waiting there, with his teeth chattering in the
extremity of his alarm. Wogan unlatched the door very carefully and saw
through the chink the sentry standing by the steps. The snow still fell;
he was glad to note the only light was a white glimmering from the waste
of snow upon the ground.

"You must go out with her," Wogan whispered to Chateaudoux, "and speak a
word to the sentry."

"At any moment the magistrate may come," said Chateaudoux, though he
trembled so that he could hardly speak.

"All the more reason for the sentinel to let your sweetheart run home at
her quickest step," said Wogan, and above him he heard Clementina come
out upon the landing. He crept up the stairs to her.

"Here is my hand," said he, in a low voice. She laid her own in his,
and bending towards him in the darkness she whispered,--

"Promise me it shall always be at my service. I shall need friends. I am
young, and I have no knowledge. Promise me!"

She was young indeed. The freshness of her voice, its little tremble of
modesty, the earnestness of its appeal, carried her youth quite home to
Mr. Wogan's heart. She was sweet with youth. Wogan felt it more clearly
as they stood together in the darkness than when he had seen her plainly
in the lighted room, with youth mantling her cheeks and visible in the
buoyancy of her walk. Then she had been always the chosen woman. Wogan
could just see her eyes, steady and mysteriously dark, shining at him
out of the gloom, a