As for the troopers, they were all her friends. They let her help them, when they cleaned their bright swords or scoured their carabines. They told her endless stories of battles and sieges and of wicked Roundheads that dined on little babies. So terrible were these stories that Merrylips quite shook in her shoes to hear them, yet she could not help asking for more. Best of all, the officers, whom she had so feared, were almost as kind as if they had been her own big brothers. They laughed at her and chaffed her, to be sure, as a little boy who had been reared too long among women, but on the whole, they all, even rough Miles Digby, were very gentle with her. Sometimes Merrylips wondered why they were so kind. But it was not until she was much older that she realized that she owed some thanks to Captain Tibbott Norris. By some strange impulse that big, harsh man was moved toward the bit of a lad that bore his own name of Tibbott, and silently he stood his friend. It was Captain Norris that gave Merrylips her brother's room for her very own. It was Captain Norris that promised to send her, by the first safe convoy, to her kinsfolk at Walsover. Above all, it was Captain Norris that from the very first made all his followers, both officers and men, understand that little Tibbott Venner was under his special care. After that it would have been a very bold man that would have harmed little Tibbott by word or deed. So Merrylips passed her days at Monksfield, safe and unafraid. Indeed she would have been quite happy, if she had not had two causes for grief that never let her be. The first was, of course, the loss of her brother Munn. At night, when she lay in his bed, she would think of all the stories that she had heard from the troopers of the cruel way in which the Roundheads used their prisoners. Then she would seem to see her brother, haggard and pale and hungry, shivering half-clad in some dismal prison, and perhaps even struck and abused by his jailers. Often, when she called up that sorrowful picture, she would have cried, if she had not promised Munn that she would bear herself as became a boy. The second trouble, not so deep as the loss of Munn, but always present, was the unfriendliness that Rupert showed her. He seemed the only soul in the Monksfield garrison that disliked her, and all the time she was so eager to be friends with him! At the outset, to be sure, Merrylips had been shy of Claus and Rupert, for she remembered how her godmother had suspected them for spies. But when she found that Claus was trusted as a good soldier by all the officers, who were her friends, she dared to think that her godmother perhaps had been mistaken. So now there was nothing to keep her from being Rupert's playfellow, as she had planned to be, long ago at Larkland. At least, there was nothing except their squabble on her first day at Monksfield. And that she was ready to forgive and forget.