One wintry afternoon, when she had talked for a long time of the Lady Venetia's pranks and plays in their girlhood together, Lady Sybil fetched a miniature from a cabinet in her chamber and showed it to Merrylips. It was the portrait of a girl of much the same age as sister Puss, Merrylips thought--a beautiful girl, with soft brown hair parted from a white forehead, and eyes that laughed, and a finger laid upon her rosy lips. On the upraised finger, Merrylips noticed, was an odd ring of two hearts entwined, wrought in what seemed dull silver. "This is my sister Venetia," said Lady Sybil. "So she looked at eighteen, save that she was fairer than any picture." "She is not so fair as you, godmother mine!" Merrylips declared. Lady Sybil smiled in answer, but faintly. Indeed, as she looked upon the picture, she sighed. "And is she dead, this sister you did love?" Merrylips hushed her voice to ask. "Ay, long years dead," Lady Sybil answered. "'Tis a piteous tale that some day thou shalt hear, but not till thou art older." She put away the miniature and spoke no more of the Lady Venetia. But all the rest of the day she seemed burdened with heavy thoughts. But at most times Lady Sybil, although she seemed to Merrylips so very old, was a gay companion. At evening, when the fire danced on the hearth and the reflected glow danced on the oak panels of the parlor wainscot, she would dance too, and she taught Merrylips to dance. Sometimes even she would play at games of hunt and hide, all up and down the dim corridors and shadowy chambers of the old house. When they were tired, Lady Sybil and Merrylips would sit by the hearth and roast crabs or crack nuts, and Merrylips, like a little gentleman, would pick out the nut-meats for Lady Sybil. By day, in the pale sunlight, they would walk in the garden and scatter crumbs for the birds that found it hard to live in the rimy days of winter. Or they would stroll through tiny Cuckstead village, where Lady Sybil would talk with the cottage women, and Merrylips would talk with the rosy village lads of lark-traps and badger hunts and the best way in which to cover a hand-ball. So the days trod on one another's heels. Merrylips heard the waits sing beneath her chamber window on a Christmas eve of frosty stars. Almost the next week, it seemed, Candlemas had come, and she had found a pale snowdrop in a sheltered corner of the garden and run to lay it in Lady Sybil's hand. Then each week, almost each day, she found a new flower by the moist brookside, or heard a new bird-note in the budding hedgerows, till spring had come in earnest, and it was Whitsunday, and in good Sussex fashion Lady Sybil and Merrylips dined on roast veal and gooseberry pudding.