It was Humfrey who first came near, almost timidly touched her hand, and said, “Cheer up.  It is but for a little while, mayhap.  She will send for thee.  Come, here is thine old palfrey—­poor old Dapple.  Let me put thee on him, and for this brief time let us feign that all is as it was, and thou art my little sister once more.”

“I know not which is truth and which is dreaming,” said Cis, waking up through her tears, but resigning her hand to him, and letting him lift her to her seat on the old pony which had been the playfellow of both.  If it had been an effort to Humfrey to prolong the word Cis into sister, he was rewarded for it.  It gave the key-note to their intercourse, and set her at ease with him; and the idea that her present rustication was but a comedy instead of a reality was consoling in her present frame of mind.  Mistress Susan, surrounded with importunate inquirers as to household matters, and unable to escape from them, could only see that Humfrey had taken charge of the maiden, and trusted to his honour and his tact.  This was, however, only the beginning of a weary and perplexing time.  Nothing could restore Cis to her old place in the Bridgefield household, or make her look upon its tasks, cares, and joys as she had done only a few short months ago.  Her share in them could only be acting, and she was too artless and simple to play a part.  Most frequently she was listless, dull, and pining, so much inclined to despise and neglect the ordinary household occupations which befitted the daughter of the family, that her adopted mother was forced, for the sake of her incognito, to rouse, and often to scold her when any witnesses were present who would have thought Mrs. Talbot’s toleration of such conduct in a daughter suspicious and unnatural.

Such reproofs were dangerous in another way, for Humfrey could not bear to hear them, and was driven nearly to the verge of disrespect and perilous approaches to implying that Cis was no ordinary person to be sharply reproved when she sat musing and sighing instead of sewing Diccon’s shirts.

Even the father himself could not well brook to hear the girl blamed, and both he and Humfrey could not help treating her with a kind of deference that made the younger brothers gape and wonder what had come to Humfrey on his travels “to make him treat our Cis as a born princess.”

“You irreverent varlets,” said Humfrey, “you have yet to learn that every woman ought to be treated as a born princess.”

“By cock and pie,” said spoilt Ned, “that beats all!  One’s own sister!”

Whereupon Humfrey had the opportunity of venting a little of his vexation by thrashing his brother for his oath, while sharp Diccon innocently asked if men never swore by anything when at sea, and thereby nearly got another castigation for irreverent mocking of his elder brother’s discipline.