If it had been some one you were not ashamed of, you would be proud of the gift and confess.

Whisper to me who it was.

I will not tell any one, not even Maudie." Her brother had risen to his feet with a quick movement, girding his red gown about him as he rose.
"Mistress Maud," he said respectfully, "I fear I have given you anxiety by detaining your charge so late.

But she is a wilful madam, as you have doubtless good cause to know, and ill to advise." "She is a Douglas," smiled the fair girl, who stood at the chamber door refusing his invitation to enter, with a flash of the eye and a quick shake of the head which betokened no small share of the same qualities; "is not that enough to excuse her for being wayward and headstrong ?" Earl William wasted no more words of entreaty upon his sister, but seized her in his arms, and pulling the coverlet in which she had huddled herself up with her pert chin on her knees, more closely about her, he strode along the passage with her in his arms till he stopped at an open door leading into a large chamber which looked to the south.
"There," he said, smiling at the girl who had followed behind him, "I will lock her in with you and take the key, that I may make sure of two such uncertain charges." But the girl had deftly extracted the key even as she passed in after him, and as the bolts shot from within she cried: "I thank you right courteously, Lord William, but mine apothecary, fearing that the air of this isle of Thrieve might not agree with me, bade me ever to sleep with the key of the door under my pillow.

Against fevers and quinsies, cold iron is a sovereign specific." And for all his wounded heart, Earl William smiled at the girl's sauciness as he went slowly back to his chamber, taking, in spite of his earldom, pains to pass his mother's door on tiptoe..