"Will you go now to fetch it?" Rupert asked in a low voice.
Merrylips nodded, and tossed him a cluster of cherries.
"Do you wait me here," she bade, as she made ready to climb down from the tree. "You will await me, Rupert?"
He kept his eyes on the ground beneath the garden wall,—the little strip of ground that Merrylips could not see. After a moment he bowed his head, and then, as Merrylips swung herself downward from branch to branch, she lost sight of him.
In breathless haste Merrylips ran to her chamber. There she flung down the cherries, and bundled into her apron her crossbow and her ball and her top and all her other treasures.
Then out she posted, in the light that now was broadening, and ran through the garden gate into the path to the spot where she had left Rupert. She found footprints in the gravel, and under the wall the elder bushes were crushed as if a man had crouched there, but she found no other sign of human creature.
Sadly enough Merrylips trudged back to her chamber and put away the playthings that Rupert had not cared to see. She felt that she should have been angry with him, if it were not that she was his only friend in Larkland and must be faithful to him. And perhaps, she tried to excuse him, he had been too ill to stay longer out-of-doors. She did not blame him for going back to his bed, and she would make him the cherry tart, just the same.
When the rest of the household rose for the day, Merrylips said no word of Rupert, for at heart she was still a little hurt. But she took the cherries in a pipkin and sat down to stone them on the shady bench by the garden door. She was thinking, as she did so, how all would be made right between her and Rupert, when she carried him the little tart. Perhaps he would even say that he was sorry that he had broken his promise to her.
Just then Mawkin came bustling to her side.
"Lackaday, mistress," cried Mawkin, "but you are lessoned fairly, and mayhap next time you'll hark to the words of them that be older and wiser than you, a-vexing her sweet Ladyship and a-setting the house by the ears, as you have done, with fetching in of graceless vagrom wretches, no whit better than they should be!"