'True,' answered her mother, 'and therefore thou art forgiven, and without a punishment; only remember thy name and take better heed of thy Pure Faith another time. What made thee come and tell me even now?'
'The sight of the broken spear in church,' stammered the little girl. 'That began it, and then I partly remembered....'
She got no further. Even to her indulgent mother (and Madam Purefoy was accounted an unwontedly tender parent in those days), Joyce could not explain how it was, that, as the glance from those grave boyish eyes fell upon her, out of the sunlit window, her 'disremembering' became suddenly a weight too heavy to be borne.
Jocosa Purefoy never forgot that Sunday, or her childish fault.
The visits of the Squire and his family to the old Manor House were few and far between. The estates in Yorkshire that Madam Purefoy had brought to her husband on her marriage were the children's real home. It was several years after this before Cecily saw her fairy princess again. The next glimpse was even more fleeting than their appearance in church, just a mere flash at the lodge gates as Jocosa and her brother cantered past on their way out for a day's hunting. Old Thomas, sitting in his arm-chair in the sun, looked critically and enviously at the man-servant who accompanied them. 'Too young—too young,' he muttered. His own hunting days were long past, but he could not bear, even crippled with rheumatism as he was, that any one but he, who had taught their father to sit a horse, should ride to hounds with his children.
Cecily had some envious thoughts too. 'I should like very well to wear a scarlet riding-dress and fur tippet, and a long red feather in my hat, and go a-hunting on old Snowball, instead of having to stop at home and take care of grandfather and mind the house.'
After she had closed the heavy iron gates with a clang, she pressed her nose between the bars and looked wistfully along the straight road, carried on its high causeway above the fens, down which the gay riders were swiftly disappearing.
But, in spite of envious looks, the gaiety of the day was short-lived. During the very first run, Snowball put her foot into a rabbit-hole, and almost came down. 'Lamed herself, sure enough,' said the man-servant grimly. No more hunting for Snowball that day. The best that could be hoped was that she might be able to carry her little mistress's light weight safely home, at a walking pace, over the few miles that separated them from Drayton. Joyce could not return alone, and Edward would not desert his sister, though he could not repress a few gloomy remarks on the homeward way.
'To lose such a splendid dry day at this season! Once the weather breaks and the floods are out, there will be no leaving the Manor House again for weeks, save by the causeway over the fens!'
Thus it was a rather melancholy trio that returned slowly by the same road over which the ponies' feet had scampered gaily an hour or two before.