"Little lass!" she said with a world of meaning. "My little lass!"
"Ay," Merrylips answered. "I am a lass, when all's said. I must put on this gown, no doubt, and oh! a petticoat is such a pestilence thing in which to climb!"
Then she stood up, but before she dressed she asked:
"Where hath my mother hid my clothes—my Tibbott clothes?"
Lady Sybil smiled, a little sadly, to see how quick Merrylips was to guess that it was Lady Venner who had ordered her back into her fit attire. But she told Merrylips where the little blue suit lay, in a chest in a far chamber. And as soon as Merrylips had flung on the girl's frock, she ran and fetched her boy's suit, even the gloves and the hat, and hung them in Lady Sybil's great wardrobe.
"I'm fain to have them where I may look upon them," she said. "And maybe, for sport, I'll don them again, only for an hour."
She looked to see if Lady Sybil would forbid, but Lady Sybil said never a word.
"On Christmas Day," said Merrylips, then. "Shall we say Christmas Day? I'll go a-masking in them."
So every night, when she laid off her girl's frock, she looked at her blue doublet and breeches that hung in the wardrobe, and fingered them, and said to herself:—
"Six days more—" or five, or four, as it might be—"and 'twill be Christmas, and godmother doth not forbid, and I shall wear my boy's dress once again."