‘Then must I go,’ said Lieschen, ‘for two are not allowed here.’

‘No! don’t leave me,’ I begged of her, and stretched out my hands for hers, while she gazed sadly from the doorway.  He suspected some foolishness or he was actually jealous.  ‘Hum-oh!’ He went forthwith a murmured groan.

She deceived me by taking her seat in perfect repose.

After smoothing her apron, ‘Now I must go,’ she said.

‘What! to leave me here alone?’

She looked at the clock, and leaned out of the window.

‘Not alone; oh, not alone!’ the girl exclaimed.  ’And please, please do not mention me—­presently.  Hark! do you hear wheels?  Your heart must not beat.  Now farewell.  You will not be alone:  at least, so I think.  See what I wear, dear Mr. Patient!’ She drew from her bosom, attached to a piece of blue ribbon, the half of an English shilling, kissed it, and blew a soft farewell to me: 

She had not been long gone when the Princess Ottilia stood in her place.

A shilling tossed by an English boy to a couple of little foreign girls in a woodman’s hut!—­you would not expect it to withstand the common fate of silver coins, and preserve mysterious virtues by living celibate, neither multiplying nor reduced, ultimately to play the part of a powerful magician in bringing the boy grown man to the feet of an illustrious lady, and her to his side in sickness, treasonably to the laws of her station.  The little women quarrelled over it, and snatched and hid and contemplated it in secret, each in her turn, until the strife it engendered was put an end to by a doughty smith, their mother’s brother, who divided it into equal halves, through which he drove a hole, and the pieces being now thrown out of the currency, each one wore her share of it in her bosom from that time, proudly appeased.  They were not ordinary peasant children, and happily for them they had another friend that was not a bird of passage, and was endowed by nature and position to do the work of an angel.  She had them educated to read, write, and knit, and learn pretty manners, and in good season she took one of the sisters to wait on her own person.  The second went, upon her recommendation, into the household of a Professor of a neighbouring University.  But neither of them abjured her superstitious belief in the proved merits of the talisman she wore.  So when they saw the careless giver again they remembered him; their gratitude was as fresh as on that romantic morning of their childhood, and they resolved without concert to serve him after their own fashion, and quickly spied a way to it.  They were German girls.

You are now enabled to guess more than was known to Ottilia and me of the curious agency at work to shuffle us together.  The doors of her suite in the palace were barred against letters addressed to the princess; the delivery of letters to her was interdicted, she consenting, yet she found one:  it lay on the broad walk of the orange-trees, between the pleasure and the fruit-gardens, as if dropped by a falcon in mid air.  Ottilia beheld it, and started.  Her little maid walking close by, exclaimed, scuttling round in front of her the while like an urchin in sabots,