cally.

"Have your will, man!" she said wearily, as if she were tired of keeping
measures with him any longer. "Things be sorely acrazed in this world.
If there be an other world where they be set straight, there shall be
some travail to iron out the creases."

"Signify you that you will sign this paper?"

Isabel passed the paper quietly to Henry.

"What matter what I signify, or what I sign? If my name must needs be
writ up in black soot, it were as well done on that paper as an other."

The King laid the document on the table, where the standish was already,
and with much show of courtesy, offered a pen to his prisoner. She
knelt down to sign, holding the pen a moment idle in her fingers.

"What a little matter art thou!" she said, soliloquising dreamily. "A
grey goose quill! Yet on one stroke of thee all my coming life
hangeth."

The pen was lifted to sign the fatal document, when the proceedings were
stopped by an unexpected little wail from something in Maude's arms.
Custance dashed down the quill, and springing up, took her little
Alianora to her bosom.

"Sign away thy birthright, my star, my dove! Wretched mother that I am,
to dream thereof! How could I ever meet thine innocent eyes again? I
will not sign it!"

"As it like you, fair Cousin," was the quiet response of that voice
gifted with such inexplicable power. "For us, we have striven but to
avance you unto your better estate. 'Tis nought to us whether ye sign
or no."

She hesitated; she wavered; she held out the child to Maude.

"I would but add," observed the King, "that yonder babe is no wise
touched by your signing of that paper. Her birthright is gone already;
or more verily, she had never none to go. Your name unto yon paper
maketh no diversity thereabout."

Still the final struggle was terrible. Twice she resumed the pen; twice
she flung it down in passionate though transient determination not by
her own act to alienate her child's inheritance and blot her own fair
name. But every time the memory of her favourite, her loving little
Richard, rose up before her, and she could not utter the refusal which
would deprive her of him for ever. Perhaps she might even yet have held
out, had the alternative been that of resigning him to any person but
Joan. But the certain knowledge that he would be taught to despise and
hate her was beyond the mother's power to endure. At last she snatched
up the pen, and dashed her name on the pa