e road all
the way for thinking, and I doubt it not. "My father or my lad----" she
argued with herself. "Which name shall I put in? It may not serve them
long, but it will save them at least this day from death."

And in the clatter of her horse's feet she found no answer to her
question.

Then she told over to herself all that her father had done for her since
she remembered--the afternoons when it was the Sabbath on the pleasant
green bank at the Duchrae loaning end, the words of wise counsel spoken
there, the struggle at the cave when the cruel Mardrochat was sent to
his account. She did not forget one. Other things also she owns that she
thought of. "Whatever may happen to me, I must--I shall save my father!"
she concluded.

She was on a lonely place on the moors, with deep moss-hags and holes in
the turf where men had cut peat. These were now filled with black water.
She stopped, took out the warrant for her father's execution, tore it
into a thousand pieces, and sunk it carefully in the deep hag. The white
horse of the King's rider meanwhile stood patiently by till she mounted
again--I warrant as swiftly as she used to do in the old days at the
Duchrae.

But the tearing of the warrant would only delay and not prevent her
father's death. She saw that clearly. There came to her the thought of
the free pardon. To inscribe a name in the blank space meant a release
from prison and the chance of escape. She resolved to write it when she
came to the next change-house.

But as she rode she fell to the thinking, and the question that surged
to and fro in her heart, like the tide in a sea-cave, was--which name
would be found written on that pardon when she rode to the Tolbooth of
Edinburgh to deliver it into the hands of the Captain of the Guard.

As she thought she urged her horse the faster, so that the sooner she
might come to the change-house and settle the question.

"He is my father," she said over and over, dwelling on all that her
father had been to her. "I cannot--I will not think of others before
him. It is my father's name I will write in the pardon--I must, yes I
must!"

And the name of another did she not mention at all, as I have been
informed. At last she came to the door of the change-house, and,
throwing her reins over the tieing post at the gate, she went in boldly.

"Bring me an inkhorn and a goose-quill!" she cried to the dame of the
inn, forgetting that she had donned her maid's clothes again