With a light and cunning hand she separated them carefully. They had been secretly attached so as to look like one. Casting her eyes rapidly over the second parchment, her heart leaped within her to find that it was another pardon, the duplicate of the first, and, like it, duly signed and sealed. It was a moment's work to write in the other name upon this great discovery. Then throwing, in her joy, a gold piece upon the table beside the shilling, she mounted at the stance, and rode away in the direction of the capital. "My word!" said the good wife of the change-house, gazing after her, "but that madam doesna want confidence. I doot she will be after no good!" "She doesna want siller," quoth her husband, gathering up the money, "and that's a deal more to the point in a change-house!" But Maisie Lennox has never told to any--not even to me, who have some right to know her secrets--that name which she first wrote when she had to choose between her father's life and her lover's. She only says, "Let every maid answer in her own heart which name she would have written, being in my place, that day in the change-house!" And even so may I leave it to all the maidens that may read my history to let their hearts answer which. For they also will not tell. CHAPTER LV. THE RED MAIDEN. The great day which we had been expecting dawned, and lo! it was even as any other day. The air was shrewdly cold when I awoke very early in the morning, just as I had awaked from sleep every morning since I can remember. It was my custom to begin to say the little prayer which my mother had taught me before I was fairly awake. This I did when I was but a boy, for the economising of time; and I continued the practice when I put away most other childish things. I declare solemnly that I was past the middle of the prayer, before the thought came to me that this was the morn of the day on which I was to die. Even then, by God's extreme mercy, fear did not take me utterly by the throat. I had dreamed of the day often, and shivered to think of that awaking. But now that it was here, it seemed to me like any morn in the years, when I used to awake in the little sunlit tourelle at Earlstoun to the noise of the singing of birds, and turn my thoughts upon riding to the Duchrae by the Grenoch side to see Maisie Lennox--little Maisie May, whom now I should see no more. So by the strengthening mercy of God I was enabled to finish my mother's prayer with some composure. And also to remember her and Maisie, commending them both to the gracious care of One who is able to keep.