In the midst the widow paused at his side and laid a folded paper by his trencher. “’Tis well you came hither now, Master Burley,” she said. “This was fetched from Tamworth for you by a close-mouthed trooper three days agone. I was almost resolving me to get upon the old mare and ride to seek you at Woodstead. I am no chit of a girl to fear those saucy knaves.” Hugh laughed, and with frank curiosity unfolded the paper; within were two gold sovereigns, but not a sign of writing, though he turned the sheet over and over. “What does this mean?” he asked blankly. “I’ve told all I know,” replied the widow. “I did my best to learn more of the fellow who brought it.” Hugh finished his dinner in silence, while he turned over various solutions. Dick was out of the kingdom, and in any case he would never have sent the coins and no word; but Sir William had supplied them with money while they lay hid at the “Sceptre”; or perhaps Frank, with his well-filled pockets and his boyish fondness for mystery, had had to do with this. At any rate the money was there in his hands and made his journey easier, so much so that he felt, had he been superstitious, he would have hailed it as a sign that he was to go on to Oxford as he had started. Yet when the twilight shut in, gray with drizzling rain, there came on him a heavy feeling of uncertainty; his own determination, though he felt so sure of it, weakened a little before the memory of the opposition of all his friends. In such a mood he loitered into the cottage parlor, where, finding the Widow Flemyng sitting idle in the dusk, he drew up a stool and blurted out to her his true name and how matters stood with him. “I fear you’d not have cared to harbor me, had you known what a charge I lay under,” he concluded humbly. “Why, child, I suspected all along,” the good woman hastened to reply, and Hugh, staring dutifully at the gray rain outside the lattice, thought it wise not to contradict her. It gratified him, too, as she continued speaking, to find she did not hold him a fool for his resolution. Indeed, she said emphatically no worse harm could befall a decent lad at Oxford than at Woodstead, and in any case she was well assured no one would ever have the heart to hang him. “You were best cast yourself on the king’s mercy,” she ended. “Now had you great friends at court, or could get to have audience with his Majesty.” “Did you ever hear the ballad of ‘Johnny Armstrong’?” Hugh asked. “Dick used to sing it. There was a man sought the king for pardon and he got little good by it.”