rtistic portions of domestic work.
However, she joyfully produced the scroll from the depths of the casket
where she kept her chief treasures, and her spindle often paused in its
dance as she watched her husband over it, with his elbows on the table
and his hands in his hair, from whence he only removed them now and
then to set down a letter or two by way of experiment. She had to be
patient, for she heard nothing that night but that he believed it was
French, that the father of deceits himself might be puzzled with the
thing, and that she might as well ask him for his head at once as
propose his consulting Master Francis.

The next night he unfolded it with many a groan, and would say nothing
at all; but he sat up late and waked in early dawn to pore over it
again, and on the third day of study he uttered a loud exclamation of
dismay, but he ordered Susan off to bed in the midst, and did not utter
anything but a perplexed groan or two when he followed her much later.

It was not till the next night that she heard anything, and then, in
the darkness, he began, "Susan, thou art a good wife and a discreet
woman."

Perhaps her heart leapt as she thought to herself, "At last it is
coming, I knew it would!" but she only made some innocent note of
attention.

"Thou hast asked no questions, nor tried to pry into this unhappy
mystery," he went on.

"I knew you would tell me what was fit for me to hear," she replied.

"Fit! It is fit for no one to hear! Yet I needs must take counsel
with thee, and thou hast shown thou canst keep a close mouth so far."

"Concerns it our Cissy, husband?"

"Ay does it Our Cissy, indeed! What wouldst say, Sue, to hear she was
daughter to the lady yonder."

"To the Queen of Scots?"

"Hush! hush!" fairly grasping her to hinder the words from being
uttered above her breath.

"And her father?"

"That villain, Bothwell, of course. Poor lassie, she is ill fathered!"

"You may say so. Is it in the scroll?"

"Ay! so far as I can unravel it; but besides the cipher no doubt much
was left for the poor woman to tell that was lost in the wreck."

And he went on to explain that the scroll was a letter to the Abbess of
Soissons, who was aunt to Queen Mary, as was well known, since an open
correspondence was kept up through the French ambassador. This letter
said that "our trusty Alison Hepburn" would tell how in secrecy and
distress Queen Mary had given birth to this poor child in Lochlev