But as she rubbed the parchment, which was very fine and soft, part of it curled up at the edge into a tiny roll like a shaving of bark when one cuts a white birch. Instantly Maisie discerned that there were two parchments instead of one.
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.