be a son to her, if
she could obtain my freedom. Nay, if only some poor maiden would promise
to wed me, and crave my pardon at the King's hand, I would in return
carry her to Scotland, and dower her with all my wealth; and that is not
little, for am I not master of the forests, and the lands, and the
Castle of Linnhe?"

Many a maiden would have been angry had she heard her lover speak these
words; but Burd Isbel loved him too much to be offended at anything
which he said, so she crept away to her chamber with a determined look
on her girlish face.

"'Tis not for thy lands or thy Castle," she whispered, "but for pure
love of thee. Love hath made maidens brave ere now, and it will make
them brave again."

That night, when all the palace was quiet, Burd Isbel wrapped herself in
a long gray cloak, and crept noiselessly from her room. She might have
been taken for a dark shadow, had it not been for her long plait of
lint-white hair and her little bare feet, which peeped out and in
beneath the folds of her cloak, as she stole down the great polished
staircase.

Silently she crept across the hall, and peeped into the guard-room.

All the guards were asleep, and, on the wall above their heads hung the
keys of the palace, and beside them a great iron key. That was the key
of the prison. She stole across the floor on tip-toe, making no more
noise than a mouse, and, stretching up her hand, she took down the heavy
key, and hid it under her cloak. Then she sped quickly out of the
guard-room, and through a turret door, into a dark courtyard where the
prison was. She fitted the key in the lock. It took all her strength to
turn it, but she managed it at last, and, shutting the door behind her,
she went into the little cell where Young Bekie was imprisoned.

A candle flickered in its socket on the wall, and by its light she saw
him lying asleep on the cold stone floor. She could not help giving a
little scream when she saw him, for there were three mice and two great
rats sitting on the straw at his head, and they had nibbled away nearly
all his long yellow hair, which she had admired so much when first he
came to Court. His beard had grown long and rough too, for he had had no
razors to shave with, and altogether he looked so strange that she
hardly knew him.

At the sound of her voice he woke and started up, and the mice and the
rats scampered away to their holes. He knew her at once, and in a moment
he forgot his dreams of