threw it
around her.

"What way, Mary?" asked Brandon gently, and receiving no answer. "But
you will have to bear my looking at you all the time if you go with
me."

"I don't believe I can do it."

"No, no," answered he, bravely attempting cheerfulness; "we may as
well give it up. I have had no hope from the first. I knew it could
not be done, and it should not. I was both insane and criminal to
think of permitting you to try it."

Brandon's forced cheerfulness died out with his words, and he sank
into a chair with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands.
Mary ran to him at once. There had been a little moment of faltering,
but there was no real surrender in her.

Dropping on her knee beside him, she said coaxingly: "Don't give up;
you are a man; you must not surrender, and let me, a girl, prove the
stronger. Shame upon you when I look up to you so much and expect you
to help me be brave. I will go. I will arrange myself in some way. Oh!
why am I not different; I wish I were as straight as the queen," and
for that first time in her life she bewailed her beauty, because it
stood between her and Brandon.

She soon coaxed him out of his despondency, and we began again to plan
the matter in detail.

The girls sat on Brandon's cloak and he and I on the camp-stool and a
box.

Mary's time was well occupied in vain attempts to keep herself covered
with the cloak, which seemed to have a right good will toward Brandon
and me, but she kept track of our plans, which, in brief, were as
follows: As to her costume, we would substitute long trunks and
jack-boots for shoes and hose, and as to doublet, Mary laughed and
blushingly said she had a plan which she would secretly impart to
Jane, but would not tell us. She whispered it to Jane, who, as serious
as the Lord Chancellor, gave judgment, and "thought it would do." We
hoped so, but were full of doubts.

This is all tame enough to write and read about, but I can tell you it
was sufficiently exciting at the time. Three of us at least were
playing with that comical old fellow, Death, and he gave the game
interest and point to our hearts' content.

Through the thick time-layers of all these years, I can still see the
group as we sat there, haloed by a hazy cloud of tear-mist. The
figures rise before my eyes, so young and fair and rich in life and
yet so pathetic in their troubled earnestness that a great flood of
pity wells up in my heart for the poor young souls