self. Afterwards came
the names of certain persons imprisoned, together with a note of the
place where each was imprisoned, and the term of his punishment.

Amongst these, towards the end, was a line which made my blood suddenly
run cold, and set the stick a trembling in my hand. It ran thus:--

"_One, Ludar, an Irishman, who carried certain Letters abroad. He lieth
in ye Tower of London, waiting Her Majesty's pleasure_."

The summer passed, and each week the maiden's cheek grew paler. She had
said little when Jeannette showed her the name on the proof which I had
kept. But she quietly took the paper and hid it in her bosom, and for a
day kept herself to her chamber.

After that she rarely mentioned Ludar's name, and when we spoke of him
to her, she always changed the talk to something else. Once or twice,
in the late summer evenings, I took her and Jeannette to row on the
river. And on each occasion we dropped on the tide to below London
Bridge, where standing out in the gloom of twilight we could see the
great frowning Tower which held still, as we hoped, a life dear to us
all.

But as the weeks sped by, with one consent we let go even that hope; and
on the last evening, when we rowed, the maiden said--

"Humphrey, row us some other way to-night."

And as she spoke, her face looked to me scarcely less white than the
shivering moonbeams on the water.

About the middle of the autumn, I met Will Peake one day, who told me
that there had been of late not a few men hanged at Tyburn and
elsewhere; some for recent treasons, and others whose sentence had been
overhanging ever since the conspiracies concerning the Scotch Queen.

When I pressed him closer, he said he had been present at one hanging at
Tyburn, but that was of a debaser of coins. But a friend of his, said
he, had seen four traitors hanged, drawn, and quartered; of whom he knew
the names of three. But the other, thought to be a Scotchman or
Irishman, no one knew his name.

I begged Will to take me to his friend that I might hear more, and
plainly told him my reason. Whereat he drew a very long face, and said
he thought better of me than to consort with such vile carrion as these
traitors to her Majesty. Nevertheless he took me to his friend to hear
what he had to say.

His friend sickened me with a long story of the horrible death of these
men, whereby he thought to entertain me as he had entertained not a few
other idle fellows during the