"So you'll go unto the wars, you two?" Longkin kept on teasing. "Then hang me if Merrylips shall not make a third! 'Hath as good right as either of ye babies to esteem herself a soldier."
Then Flip and Munn cast themselves upon the scoffing eldest brother and mauled him gloriously in a welter of yelping dogs. Like a loyal heart Merrylips tossed by her apple and ran in to aid the weaker side, where she cuffed Flip and tugged at Munn's arm with no mean skill.
But in the thick of the fray she got a knock on the nose from Flip's elbow, and promptly she lost her hot little temper. She did not cry, for she had been too well trained by those big brothers, but she screamed, "Hang thee, varlet!" and hurled herself upon Flip.
She heard Longkin cry, "Our right old Merrylips!"
Through the haze that swam before her eyes, which were all dazzled with the knock that she had got, she saw Flip's laughing face, as he warded her off, and she raged at him for laughing. Then, all at once, she heard her shrill little voice raging in a dead stillness, and in the stillness she heard a grave voice speak.
"Sybil! Little daughter!"
Merrylips let fall her clenched hands. Shamefacedly she turned, and in the doorway that opened on the terrace she saw Lady Venner stand.
"Honored mother!" faltered Merrylips, and stumbled through a courtesy.
All in a moment she longed to cry with pain and shame and fright, but she would not, while her brothers looked on. Instead she blinked back the tears, and at a sign from her mother started to follow her into the house.
"If it like you, good mother, the fault was mine to vex the child," said Longkin.