While she lay wondering, and perhaps dozing a little, in bustled pretty Betteris Fowell.
"Art waking, Tibbott-Merrylips?" she cried. "Then art thou well enough to rise? Here's my father is fain to have a sight of the little maid that footed it, like a little lad, from Monksfield unto Ryeborough."
"But I've no clothes," Merrylips said sadly, for indeed she longed to get up.
"And so said my sister Allison and my lady mother," Betteris replied. "But my father said surely thy boy's dress was seemly to-day as it was yesterday, and vowed he'd see thee in that same attire. So up with thee, and be a lad again!"
Now that she was well rested, Merrylips thought it would be sport to be a boy once more, for a little while. She scrambled laughing from the bed, and as if it were a masking frolic, she dressed, with Betteris to help her. She put on a little clean smock and stockings, and the ruddy brown doublet and breeches. They had been neatly brushed, so that they did not look so much like the clothes of a beggar child. Last of all, she put on her warlike little leather jerkin, and then she felt herself a lad again.
Quite gallantly, Merrylips left the chamber at Betteris's side, but on the staircase she paused.
"Where is Rupert?" she said. "For 'twas Rupert brought us hither. He found the way, and won us food, and was brave when the soldiers did affright us. Surely, my lord, your father, is more eager to see Rupert than to look on me."
At first Betteris seemed likely to laugh and say nay, but when she looked at Merrylips' earnest little face, she changed her mind.
"It shall be as thou wilt," she said, and bent and kissed her.
So they waited in the hall, while a servant fetched Rupert from the kitchen. He came almost at once, and he was clean and brushed and had new shoes, but he was shyer and more sullen than Merrylips remembered him. He did not even offer to take her hand.