The Youngest Girl in the School

‘Please,’ she said, clasping her hands tightly together, ‘I want to go to school, a real girls’ school, where there are crowds of girls, and crowds of lessons, and crowds of story-books with nice endings, and crowds of awfully jolly games that don’t pull your hair about and don’t give you bruises. May I–may I have all that?’

Auntie Anna once more struck her cane upon the ground. ‘That shows how much you know about your own daughter, Everard!’ she said, which was a remark that Barbara never understood. ‘You may have all that, little goddaughter, every bit of it!’ she announced to the expectant child; ‘and what is more, you shall have it in a week’s time. Hey-day! Where are you off to in such a hurry, if you please, and why am I allowed a kiss all at once, eh? It isn’t a birthday, is it?’

For Barbara had rushed impetuously to the door, and then scampered back to kiss the face with the hooked nose that peered out from beneath the steeple-hat. ‘Of course I kissed you,’ she cried, ‘because–because you’re such a brick, you see!’ She paused half-way in her second journey to the door, and looked back doubtfully at the old lady on the sofa. ‘May I ask you something else?’ she said.

‘Anything you please,’ answered Auntie Anna. ‘That’s what I’m here for; eh, Everard?’

‘Then–then–are you going to do anything for the boys too?’ stammered Barbara. ‘I–I don’t think it’s quite fair to keep all the niceness to myself, you see!’

‘That depends on what the boys want,’ replied the old lady, gravely. ‘Do you think you can give me any idea?’

Barbara puckered up her eyebrows, and counted off the names on her fingers. ‘First there’s Egbert,’ she began; ‘he wants to go to Oxford without having to get a scholarship first. Then there’s Wilfred; he wants to be a doctor, but Kit says there isn’t money enough and he’s got to get over it. Do you think you’ll be able to make Will into a doctor? And Peter wants lots of shooting; he says he doesn’t mind about anything else, only Kit says he isn’t old enough, and you won’t trust him with a gun. Kit hasn’t seen you yet, you see. Then there’s Kit––’

‘That’s enough for the present!’ cried Mrs. Crofton, who was leaning back, convulsed with laughter, among the sofa cushions. Mr. Berkeley again drew his daughter towards him.

‘You are revealing all the secrets of the prison-house, little girl,’ he remarked.

Barbara looked from one to the other. ‘Auntie Anna did ask me,’ she said reproachfully.

‘To be sure I did,’ answered the old lady, recovering herself with an effort, ‘and I am delighted to hear some of the things I am expected to do. But you must allow that even a fairy godmother has a hard time of it occasionally, and it is a little difficult to provide for all her godchildren at once, you know. However, you shall hear what is going to happen in a week’s time, on the very day that this naughty father of yours takes himself off to America; and if you approve of it, we can see about the other things later on. Is that a bargain, eh?’

‘Oh! What else is going to happen in a week’s time?’ asked Barbara, eagerly. By this time she was prepared for any dream to come true. Her faith in the old lady who was playing at fairy stories was complete.

Mr. Berkeley answered her. ‘Auntie Anna is going to carry you all off to Crofts for the whole six months that I am away,’ he told her; ‘and you are going to Jill’s school at Wootton Beeches, which is only ten miles off. So Kit and Robin will be able to come over and see you sometimes, when the others have gone away, for they are going to have a tutor and stay at Crofts with Auntie Anna and Jill. Isn’t that a fine idea?’

Barbara was speechless with rapture. The expression on her face made them laugh once more. Then she gave a kind of war-whoop that might have been heard in the schoolroom, and bounded again towards the door. ‘I simply can’t bear it another minute,’ she gasped. ‘I must go and tell the boys.’

‘Bear it just one more minute, and hear what else I have to say,’ begged Auntie Anna, raising herself with the help of her stick, and walking slowly after her excited little niece. ‘Can you ride bicycles, all of you?’

The child shook her head. ‘Only Egbert,’ she said; ‘and that is because he stayed with a chap, last holidays, who lent him one. Bicycles are too jolly expensive for this family, you know,’ she added quaintly.

Auntie Anna stood still and pointed the blue-knobbed cane impressively at the child, who stood waiting. ‘What do you say to a bicycle apiece all round,’ she began, ‘and––’

But Barbara did not wait to say anything. Back along the hall she scampered with all her might, and flung herself panting into the schoolroom. She burst out at once with a rapturous medley of news.

‘Boys, boys!’ she shouted at the top of her voice; ‘the dragon isn’t a dragon, she’s like a fairy godmother out of a story-book! And she’s going to send me to the adopted kid’s school, and everybody is going to live at Crofts till father comes back, and there’s going to be bicycles all round–no waiting ’cause you’re the youngest, Bobbin!–and––’

Suddenly she paused and stammered, and paused again. Finally, she stood silent and uncomfortable, with the excitement and the thrill all gone out of her. She had quite forgotten Jill; and Jill, enthroned in the one arm-chair, with the one cushion at her back and the one footstool at her feet, was looking as though she was not there to be forgotten.

‘I’ve just been telling the boys all about it,’ she remarked.

Barbara stared. It put the finishing touch to her distrust of Jill, that she should have told anything to the boys–her boys–before she had time to tell them herself.

‘I–I think it’s a shame!’ she exclaimed hotly, and she bit her lip to keep from crying.

‘Hullo, Babe! What’s up?’ asked Peter, in surprise.

Jill slipped out of the arm-chair, and laid her hand on the child’s shoulder. ‘I’m so sorry, Babs,’ she began softly; ‘I really didn’t know––’

Barbara looked up at her doubtfully. The tone was kind, but then, why did she go on smiling in that irritating way? ‘You don’t understand,’ she said, and twisted herself free from Jill’s grasp, and did not speak again until she was gone.

The boys took no notice of her; they always left the Babe alone when she was in one of her odd moods. But Jill, who had really meant to be kind, went away feeling puzzled. She had got over her first shyness of the boys in a very few minutes, for they were evidently trying to be friendly in their blunt, boyish fashion; but Barbara baffled her. There was something antagonistic in the child’s manner; and Jill, who had always been accustomed to meeting with affection wherever she went, did not quite know what to make of her. Of course it was ridiculous to worry herself about a tomboy of eleven who chose to be sulky; but it was the first time any one had refused to make friends with her, and Jill was a little hurt about it.

‘You’re spoiled, my dear,’ remarked her mother, as they drove away from the Berkeleys’ house; ‘and it is I who have spoiled you. I’m a silly old woman, but I never could bear to deny you all the sympathy you asked. I was afraid, you see, that you might think the world was not a nice place to be in.’

‘I’m glad you spoiled me, and I think the world is a nice place to be in,’ answered Jill, laughing. ‘But what has that to do with Barbara’s not liking me?’

‘Well, you can’t expect every one to like you,’ said the old lady, in her brusque way. ‘Babs will like you well enough when she finds that she is still the Babe of the family, in spite of your being there.’

‘But–but I don’t like to feel that there is anybody anywhere who doesn’t like me,’ complained Jill, with a little pout.

‘No more does the Babe, I expect,’ said Mrs. Crofton, smiling. ‘However, do your best to understand the poor little soul; she has not had much spoiling, and I should like you two to be friends.’

‘Oh!’ cried Jill, laughing again as she recalled the funny little figure that had come bounding into the schoolroom with such a yell and a clatter. ‘But she really is rather impossible, mother dear!’

‘Quite,’ responded the old lady, drily; ‘but she has amazing possibilities, and I thought you might perhaps like to find them. Well, what about the others?’

‘Oh, I like them,’ said Jill; ‘though I wish they would not all talk at once; it’s so confusing. And I’m a little afraid of them, too. You never know why they are laughing at you; and if you take them seriously, they laugh more than ever. Whatever you do, they laugh.’

‘Large families are always like that,’ chuckled Mrs. Crofton.

‘Large families are rather exhausting then, aren’t they?’ said Jill. ‘The boys are rather rough too, and they seem so proud of having scars on their hands, and of being able to see a pig killed without feeling bad–at least, Peter was. Kit is different from the others: I like Kit. And they are frank! They were not ashamed of calling me the “adopted kid” to my face; and they even owned to having nicknamed you “the dragon”!’

The old lady laughed. ‘So I am, as far as they know!’ she replied. Then she patted the girl caressingly on the hand. ‘My dear, it does us all good to be with people who are frank, even if they are a little rough with it. And I want you to help me to put as much love and gentleness as we can into the Berkeleys’ lives, for it strikes me that spoiling is what this large family wants.’

‘Then it’s what this large family will certainly get, if you have anything to do with it,’ answered Jill, softly.

In the schoolroom they had just left, the criticisms were brief and to the point.

‘She’ll do,’ said Peter, condescendingly, ‘when she’s got over that silly way of gaping at us, as though we were beasts at the Zoo.’

‘She’s stunning to look at, and her clothes are just ripping,’ said Egbert, the eldest; ‘but, of course, you kids couldn’t be expected to notice that.’

‘Oh, you think you’re everybody, just because you stayed with a chap last holidays who had a grown-up sister who called you Mr. Berkeley,’ cried Wilfred.

Robin said he liked her soft way of speaking, and she reminded him of Nurse, which set them all laughing, as they recalled that homely-looking person in cap and spectacles. Christopher put in his opinion, when they had all had their say.

‘She wants knowing,’ he said briefly. ‘There’s too many of us in a lump to let her give herself away. When she takes us separately, or in pairs, we shall get on as right as rain. And she really does know something about stamps.’

But the Babe, who sat away in a corner by herself, said nothing. She had forgotten Jill for the moment, forgotten her own fit of jealousy and her shyness of the interloper, and she did not even hear what the others were talking about. She was going to school at last, and nothing else was of any consequence. Indeed, all through the week of whirl and preparation that followed, Barbara went about in a kind of dream. She could hardly yet believe in her good luck. A few short days ago things had seemed likely to go on for ever in the same uneventful way, except that they were going to be made dreary for a time by the absence of the father she adored; and now, just through the coming of an old lady, whom she had been prepared to hate, this amazing change in her future was going to take place. To an imaginative little person like Barbara, it was useless to pretend that there was nothing out of the ordinary in this. She had lived for years in a fairy world of her own, where Kit was a fairy prince and her father a nice old magician, and where numbers of charming princesses, the schoolgirls of her imagination, were ready to sympathise with her whenever the boys had been teasing her more than usual. It was surely to this kingdom of her fancy that a fairy godmother, who had once been a dragon, properly belonged; and all through that week, Barbara wandered in her imaginary kingdom with this new inhabitant of it, pointing out all its beauties to her, and even assuring her that the magician would cure her rheumatism if she were to ask him nicely. ‘Only, you must not make her back quite straight,’ she whispered privately to the magician, ‘because she wouldn’t be a proper fairy godmother if her back were straight!’ She also added strict injunctions to the keeper of her gates, that a certain grown-up cousin, who might be known by her tiresome way of smiling at people, was not to be admitted under any circumstances into her fairy kingdom. ‘It would never do,’ thought Barbara, seriously, ‘to have any one in my kingdom who wanted to laugh at me.’

Meanwhile, the busy preparations went on around her. It was not an easy thing to move a family of six from the home in which they had passed the whole of their lives, especially when their aunt, in the large manner which characterised everything she did, insisted on allowing them to pack whatever they wished.

‘We are only young once,’ she represented to a distracted housekeeper, ‘and possessions are very precious when we are young. Let them bring everything that will help to make the place seem like home to them; there is plenty of room at Crofts. Get tired of the things? Of course they will! We can’t expect them to be wiser than the grown-ups, can we?’

So Wilfred packed explosive liquids in bottles, and Peter packed cricket stumps and hockey clubs, and Christopher found room among Egbert’s collars and ties to stow away microscope-slides and setting-boards and birds’ eggs, and Robin brought innumerable contributions in the shape of torn picture-books and old toys that the others had discarded long ago. None of them ever forgot that last week in their London home; for besides the exquisite joys of packing up, there were also delightful expeditions up to town with Auntie Anna, ostensibly to buy clothes, but in reality to afford amusement to an old lady who had never enjoyed her life so much before; and whether they went alone with her, or in such numbers that the brougham was as full as it could be, the afternoon always ended with a magnificent tea without limitations–‘Even ices to finish up with, and no one saying nothink about your makin’ yourself ill ’cause you mixed things!’ as Robin proclaimed on his return home from one of these expeditions.

Then there was the buying of the six bicycles; and even Barbara forgot for the moment all about school and everything else for the sake of her new two-wheeled possession, soon to be invested in her mind with magic properties and converted into a fairy messenger in her fairy kingdom. She was less patient over the purchase of her school outfit, which kept her standing at the dressmaker’s for whole half-hours together, when she might have been trying her bicycle round the square; and she wondered why it was necessary to have such quantities of clothes, just because she was going to live at school instead of at home. Surely, if her present wardrobe was good enough to pass the critical examination of five brothers, it need not be improved to meet the friendly gaze of a parcel of girls! However, Auntie Anna insisted on more clothes; and Auntie Anna was a witch, so she ought to know. And since she did not take the dressmaker’s part, but even allowed Barbara to have her own way as to the shortness of her skirts, with an added inch or so to satisfy the scruples of the dressmaker, it was impossible to grumble very much at the precious time that was being wasted.

So the week drew swiftly to a close, and the day of departure came at last.

CHAPTER III
BARBARA’S DREAM

‘It’s got a lot to do with it,’ rejoined Kit. ‘Didn’t she take us all to the pantomime, last night–father, too? I suppose you think that was just to amuse herself, don’t you? Well, it wasn’t. It was because she was afraid of our sitting together at home, and saying it was father’s last evening, and–blubbing.’

This he said severely, looking at the weaker members, Babs and Robin, as he spoke. They bore the test heroically, and the orator went on.

‘And why,’ he inquired, ‘did she give us only a week to pack up, and buy clothes and things, when there’s ten days more before you other chaps go back? Of course there’s the Babe’s school, but that could have waited. Girls’ schools never matter.’

‘Well, why, most precocious of kids?’ asked Egbert, with lazy tolerance. Certainly, no one but Christopher would have been allowed to say so much uninterrupted. But then, even Egbert had a kind of secret admiration for his clever young brother, though he did not pretend to understand him.

‘Well,’ continued Christopher, ‘if we’d had more time to think about it, we might not have been so keen on going to live in another person’s house. And, naturally, Auntie Anna didn’t want any ructions over it.’

‘Oh, stop it, Kit! What a lot of rot you are making up!’ objected Peter, impatiently. Of the three elder boys, he was nearest in age to Kit, and was consequently less inclined to tolerate him.

‘Everything points to it, if you’re not too thick-headed to see,’ retorted Kit, crushingly. ‘Look at the way we’re being rushed out of the house, directly father has turned his back. Isn’t that to give us something to think about, so that we shouldn’t mope about the shop, and fancy ourselves? Of course,’ he added blandly, fixing his spectacles on his nose and staring at Peter, ‘some people don’t need anything to set them grinning again.’

‘Christopher, my son, you are a clever child, but your impudence simply isn’t to be borne,’ said Peter; and he stooped down and lifted the fragile figure of the orator high in the air, and set him down lightly outside the door. Kit rearranged his tie, put his spectacles straight, and peered up at the unappreciative listener who towered above him.

‘As I was saying,’ he resumed gently, ‘Auntie Anna can give us all points when it comes to being ’cute.’

The next day or two proved the truth of what, in his shrewd way, he had already guessed for himself. Yet the Berkeleys were hardly to be called unfeeling, because they appeared to take their father’s departure so coolly; for it would have been difficult to remain unhappy long, when there were so many delightful things to distract them. Besides their excitement, town-bred as they were, at finding themselves in a real country-house, with an oak staircase, a secret room, and a ghost story, there were separate joys waiting for each one of them as well. There was a horse for Egbert to ride to hounds, and a well-stocked library for Christopher to bury himself in, and a lumber-room for Wilfred to turn into a laboratory; while Peter was allowed, the very first day, to go out shooting with the keepers, and Robin promptly became the pet of all the men on the estate, and spent long, happy hours with them down at the stables and the farm. If there was any one in the family who was not perfectly content, it was Barbara.

No doubt, she would have been quite as absorbed as the others were in their new home, if she had not been going to another one herself the very next day. As it was, she found it a little difficult to share their enthusiasm since she had a private enthusiasm of her own. But the boys did not understand this at all. They were very affectionate to her in their rough, undemonstrative way, and they were always telling her that she would be sure to ‘pull through all right’; for they naturally supposed that she wanted the kind of pity they wanted so much themselves at the stated, horrible periods when they went back to school. But as to grasping her notion that she was going to enjoy life at Wootton Beeches, that was not to be expected of them. So Barbara felt that her interests, for the first time in her life, were not the same as theirs; and a queer sort of feeling crept over her, that changes–even nice, interesting changes–occasionally had something strange and uncomfortable about them. She grew so perplexed over it, at last, that she even went to Jill for sympathy. Jill was at least a girl, and Jill had been to school, in the same delightful place to which she was going on the morrow; and Jill at least ought to know whether the boys’ idea of school was right or wrong. So, just after tea, on her last evening at Crofts, the child swallowed her natural distrust of her cousin, which, after all, had arisen chiefly from their mutual shyness of each other, and started in search of her.

Jill was in the conservatory, arranging the flowers for the dinner-table; and Barbara’s shyness returned, as the trim, neat figure came walking towards her, along the rows of chrysanthemums. She glanced down at her crumpled pinafore and sighed desperately. Being dragged up a dusty ladder into a cobwebby lumber-room by Wilfred had not proved the best of treatments for a pinafore that really had been clean a couple of hours ago. But Jill suddenly came out in a new light. With no teasing schoolboys to overhear her, she felt that here, at last, was a chance of making friends with her odd little tomboy of a cousin.

‘Have you come to help me with the flowers?’ she asked, with such a friendly smile, that Babs cheered up at once. She forgot all about her crumpled pinafore, and went straight to the point.

‘No, I didn’t come for that,’ she answered simply. ‘I came to ask you about–about school.’

‘Ah!’ said Jill, suddenly picking chrysanthemums at a great rate. ‘Supposing you tell me what you think about it yourself?’

Her mother’s words were running in her head: ‘Do your best to understand the poor little soul!’ and Jill wondered what she could tell her that would not upset her notions of school too cruelly.

‘Oh, well,’ replied Babs, ‘of course, I think it’s going to be beautiful; but the boys–the boys are so funny about it, and it’s made me all in a muddle inside. Do you think the boys know?’

‘Perhaps not,’ said Jill, and she strolled away along the rows of chrysanthemums. It seemed a shame to spoil the child’s illusion; and yet, when she thought of this quaint little untrained object being dropped in the middle of the girls at Wootton Beeches––

Barbara had followed her up closely, and she suddenly interrupted her reflections. ‘You know what a girls’ school is like, don’t you, Jill?’ she continued appealingly. ‘I wish–I do wish you would tell the boys they are all wrong about it. They are wrong, aren’t they?’

There was a suspicion of a doubt in the last words that struck Jill as being rather pathetic. She put her bunch of chrysanthemums down, and drew Barbara towards her. ‘You see, Babs, it is like this,’ she said slowly; ‘school is very nice, if you do not mind things being strange at first, and if you can bear being laughed at, and––’

‘Why, that is quite easy!’ interrupted Babs, with a smile. ‘The boys have teased me always.’

‘Yes,’ said Jill, doubtfully; ‘the boys have teased you; but that is not quite the same thing. Girls–girls are not boys, you see.’

‘Oh no, I know they’re not!’ replied Barbara, happily. ‘Girls are quiet and kind and gentle; and they always understand you, and they are ready to make friends directly they see you. I think I know what girls are like.’

She was thinking of the princesses in her fairy kingdom; and another little smile flickered across her face. Jill glanced at her for a moment, and then suddenly made up her mind how to act.

‘Look here, Babs,’ she began, smoothing the mop of tangled hair with her hands; ‘you go on thinking that girls are like that, and you’ll get along all right!’ Barbara wriggled away from her before she had time to say any more, gave her a swift look and a smile of gratitude, and darted off in search of the boys. ‘They’ll be very stupid if they don’t see what a babe it is,’ added Jill to herself.

At the door of the conservatory, however, the small figure in the crumpled pinafore came to a sudden standstill.

‘I say, Jill,’ the child blurted out, and she clutched a handful of pinafore to give herself courage; ‘I–I want to tell you something.’

‘Do you?’ said Jill, smiling.

‘I want to explain that I hated you at first, because I thought you were going to make the boys like you better than me,’ Babs went on breathlessly. ‘And you frightened me too, because you laughed in such a funny way, just as if you were sneering at me for being in a muck. I thought, perhaps, it was because you were so grand, and your clothes were so grand, and all that; but I couldn’t help being in a muck, because I always am in a muck, you see; and so, you see–you see––’

‘I see,’ said Jill, quietly; and she looked quite thoughtful for a minute or two. Babs came a step nearer.

‘I don’t hate you now,’ she said frankly. ‘For one thing, the boys don’t like you better than me, after all. They don’t even like you so much as they thought they were going to. But I think you’re awfully nice,–almost as nice as Kit and Nurse and father,–and I shall go and tell them so, now; and then, perhaps, they won’t say you are young-ladyish any more!’

There was a vision of slim black legs and white pinafore disappearing across the hall, and Jill could not help laughing. ‘I must catch the post, and write to that child Jean,’ she decided, after a moment’s reflection. ‘It won’t be so bad for the poor little mite if she has some one to show her round.’

Late on the following afternoon the ‘adopted kid’ found another chance of making her way to Barbara’s heart. Barbara had wandered into the library, with a whole hour to spare before the carriage should come round to drive her to school; and, rather to her surprise, she discovered Kit there, sitting huddled up in the arm-chair, with his shoulders up to his ears. She had thought that all the boys were out ratting, and she had not expected to see any of them until they came in at tea-time to bid her farewell. She was feeling rather doleful, now that the important moment was so near, for she realised that if she was going to everything that was new and delightful, she was also going away from the boys for the first time in her life. It did not cheer her to find Christopher sitting over the fire with an attack of asthma.

‘Kit!’ she cried in distress. ‘I didn’t know you were ill!’

Kit crouched closer to the fire and growled. Asthma always had a bad effect upon his temper, and to-day he had a grievance as well.

‘Of course you didn’t know,’ he muttered. ‘You never know anything now. Can’t think what’s come over you lately.’

Barbara reddened, and the tears welled up in her eyes. No one could hurt her so easily as Christopher. ‘I’m awfully sorry, Kit. I suppose I’ve been thinking about school,’ she said; and she dropped the poker with a bang that made him wince.

‘Lucky for you to be able to go to school,’ answered Kit, crossly. ‘Look at me! Just because of that journey on Wednesday I’ve got to coddle like an old woman.’

Barbara stood gazing at him helplessly. Her heart was full of pity, but no one had ever taught her how to show it. ‘Poor old boy!’ she said awkwardly. ‘Would you like me to tell you a story?’

‘Not I! How can you think of a story when you’re full of that stupid school?’ was the surly answer.

‘But I’m not thinking about school now, Kit,’ persisted the Babe, becoming tearful.

‘Oh, never mind. Don’t cry, whatever you do; I’ve got such a headache,’ said Christopher, hastily.

‘I’m n–not crying; I never cry,’ stammered Barbara, in a shaky voice. ‘I–I want to do something for you, only you won’t tell me what to do.’

Kit answered her with a violent struggle for breath, and the child felt more helpless than ever. It was just as she was making a feeble attempt to raise him in his chair that Jill came in.

‘You poor fellow!’ she exclaimed, taking in the whole scene at once. ‘Here, Babs, give me that piece of brown paper, and run and fetch his medicine, will you? Poor boy! Poor Kit!’

She knelt beside him and supported him with her arm, while she wafted a smouldering tuft of brown paper in front of him. ‘Now, fetch some cushions out of the drawing-room,’ she commanded, when Barbara returned with the medicine; and, delighted at being given something to do, the child sped away on her errand. When she came back with her arms full of cushions, Jill had a delightful plan to unfold.

‘Ring the bell for the lamp, Babs,’ she said, in her soft voice, which was already soothing Christopher’s nerves; ‘and we’ll have tea together before you go. Shall we, Kit, dear?’

‘It’s awfully good of you,’ he answered weakly. The attack was passing off, and he was visibly cheering up. By the time tea was brought in, he was sufficiently recovered to take the lead in his usual determined manner; and Jill humoured him by giving in to him meekly, even consenting, under his guidance, to toast slices of plum-cake at the end of a penknife.

‘It’s very extravagant, when it’s Auntie Anna’s plum-cake instead of the stale stuff cook used to make; but as it’s the Babe’s last evening we may be extravagant, mayn’t we, Jill?’ argued Christopher. ‘Now, Babs, you melt the butter; and for goodness’ sake do remember you’re not at home, and don’t smash the plate.’

His reminder did not wholly make the desired effect upon Babs, for when the boys returned from the farm in a noisy tribe, flushed with the glory of slaying, they found the ‘adopted kid’ scrubbing her gown with a clean handkerchief, while Babs hung over her, covered with confusion.

‘Don’t worry yourself, child,’ Jill was saying consolingly. ‘A lump of butter, more or less, doesn’t make any difference to a frock I’ve worn all the winter.’

‘It just slid off the plate when I wasn’t looking,’ said Barbara, penitently. ‘I can’t think why it didn’t slide on to my frock instead of yours.’

A chorus of merriment rang from behind.

‘You ridiculous Babe!’ shouted Peter. ‘Why, the butter is tired of being spilled down your frock.’

Jill jumped to her feet, and blushed a little. As Kit had predicted, she found it much easier to get on with her cousins when she took them ‘separately, or in pairs’; and she was not used yet to facing them all at once. The sound of wheels outside gave her an excuse for escape, and she put her arm hurriedly round Babs.

‘Come upstairs and put on your hat,’ she suggested, and the two girls hastened out of the room.

Auntie Anna saw to it that the farewells were not prolonged, and Barbara found herself whirled into the covered wagonette with her last words only half said. Kit was allowed time to whisper a gruff apology for being cross with her before tea, but the others had to follow her to the front door to shout their good-byes after her.

‘Don’t get the blues because we are not there!’ cried Wilfred.

‘I’ll write great lots of times,’ declared Robin, who was in tears. ‘I won’t even wait for the lines to be ruled, Babs dear. You won’t mind the spelling, will you? ’Cause it saves so much time if you don’t.’

‘Cheer up!’ was all Egbert said; and Barbara wondered if she was very hard-hearted, because she was not half so wretched as they all expected her to be. Peter even made her laugh outright, as he sprang on the step of the carriage, and went a little way down the drive with them.

‘Don’t funk it, old girl!’ he shouted through the window. ‘And just send for us, if anything goes wrong!’

‘Be off with you!’ said Auntie Anna, shutting up the window; and that was the last that the Babe of the Berkeley family saw of the boys who had been her only companions through life.

She had plenty to think about in her long drive in the dark; and Auntie Anna was wise enough to leave her alone most of the time. A little more than an hour later, however, when the carriage made a sharp turn and drove through some gates, the old lady roused her by a touch on the arm.

‘We are just there, little woman,’ she said in her quick, abrupt way. ‘Not afraid, eh?’

‘Oh no!’ answered Barbara, smiling. ‘I–I’m just excited.’

Mrs. Crofton kissed the eager little face, on which the light shone as they approached the house.

‘That’s right,’ she said, looking pleased. ‘Always be a truthful little girl, and don’t mind if you find you are not like other people.’

Then the horses stopped, and a blaze of light shone down a flight of steps to the carriage door; and Babs, feeling suddenly very small and unimportant, in spite of the extra inch or two on her new serge frock, followed the old lady into the great wide hall of Wootton Beeches.

Her dream was coming true at last.

CHAPTER IV
HOW IT CAME TRUE

Miss Finlayson had a way of looking at a girl that generally made a friend of her at once. Her eyes were a peculiar shade of blue-grey that gave them, as a rule, a cold expression; but they were also capable of a glimpse of humour that completely altered and softened them, and it was the discovery of this quality in them that changed Barbara’s impatience all at once to curiosity.

‘One moment, little girl, before you go through that door over there,’ began Miss Finlayson, and her face was still grave in spite of the betraying twinkle in her eyes. ‘Tell me, have you ever known any girls before?’

‘Only Jill,’ answered Barbara, wondering why she was being asked such an odd question.

‘Ah!’ said Miss Finlayson. The child caught the change in her tone, and went on quickly.

‘I know Jill didn’t approve of me at first,’ she said, in her small, anxious voice; ‘but she does now, I think. Besides, Jill is grown-up, you see; and I don’t think it counts if you are grown-up, does it? I’ve never met any real, nice, friendly girls before, who don’t tease you, or bully you, or anything like that. That’s why I wanted to come to school.’

‘Ah!’ said Miss Finlayson again. Then she put out her hand and patted the cheek of her little new pupil. ‘Do not be unhappy if you find you are not like the other girls,’ she said, just as Auntie Anna had done; ‘and come to me, if everything else fails and you cannot stand by yourself. Only, remember–you are not in the nursery any longer: you have come here to learn how to grow up straight and strong and healthy, just as a plant learns; and I am only the gardener to give you a prop, when you have been in too great a hurry and are trying to grow too fast. Do you think you understand?’ Her voice changed again, and a laugh came into it as she added brightly: ‘Come along now, and be a happy little girl. You will find that most of us are happy in this house.’

She took Babs by the hand, and raced her along the passage to the door at the end, then turned the handle and pushed the child gently into the room.

‘Girls,’ said the head-mistress, in the sudden lull that followed her entrance, ‘here is a new schoolfellow for you.’

Then all the voices broke out again, and Miss Finlayson nodded to Barbara, and went away. It was one of Miss Finlayson’s theories, that a new girl should be left to fight her way by herself; but as she retreated slowly along the passage this evening, she could not help feeling a little anxious about the child with the small, eager face, whom she had just launched into a strange and unfriendly world.

Barbara took two quick steps forward, as the door closed behind her, and stood there waiting. She had acted this scene over and over again in her mind, and she had always made her entrance like this; after which a girl, whose face was plump and ordinary, and whose legs were of the right proportions, and whose hair was smooth and under proper control, had always come towards her with a welcoming smile and had led her up to the other girls, who all had welcoming smiles too. And everybody had listened to her while she talked about her home and her father and the boys; and nobody had laughed and nobody had teased, and nobody had told her to ‘shut up.’ It had been a very favourite scene in her dream of school, and she waited eagerly for the other actors in it to come forward and do their part. But no one moved.

The room in which she found herself was certainly not like the one she had imagined. It was long and low and prettily shaped, with two wide bow-windows thrown out on one side of it, and a great square fireplace taking up most of the wall that faced the doorway. Next to the fireplace was a curtained archway, which evidently formed the entrance into another room, judging by the buzz of laughter and conversation from beyond that the thick red curtain failed to stifle. The bookshelves on the two remaining walls were made of plain oak; so were the desks and chairs that stood neatly arranged round the room in rows. There were also plain oak benches in the warm chimney-corners, and plain oak window-seats in the bowed recesses, while the floor was made of the same wood and was left quite bare, except for a rug in front of the hearth. A pot or two of chrysanthemums, some blue china on the over-mantel, and one or two hammered metal lamps that hung from the beams in the ceiling, were the only ornaments in the room; and the whole effect was so simple and so clean that Barbara, fresh from the dingy old schoolroom in which she had passed her life until now, was obliged to forget everything else for the moment and just stare round her. Then her eyes rested again on the girls who were scattered in groups about the room, and the expectant look on her face became a little wistful.

There seemed to be thirty or forty of them all together; and from the noise on the other side of the curtain Babs concluded that there were as many, or more, in the room beyond. They all talked without ceasing,–all at once, it seemed to Barbara,–about their Christmas holidays and their Christmas presents, about the parties they had been to and the pantomimes they had seen, about the girls who were not back and the girls who were, about everything, in fact, except the child by the door, who had been waiting all her life for this moment. What did it matter to them that she should go through a few seconds of embarrassment? They had all been through the same, in their time; and it was not to be supposed that they should make things any easier for future generations of new girls. So they went on babbling about their own affairs, and Barbara went on expecting some one to come and put an end to her discomfort. But nobody came.

Slowly, she began to feel conscious, just as she had done when she first met Jill, that there was something odd about her appearance. In spite of the extra inch or two on the bottom hem of her frock, and the temporary smoothness that a vigorous application of a wet brush had produced on her hair, Babs saw with a kind of dismay that she was not made in the same pattern as the crowd of neatly dressed girls before her. None of them wore her hair loose and curly like her own, and none of them looked as though she did not know what to do with her hands. If only she could have held on to something, Barbara felt sure she would not have felt so shy or so helpless. There was a chair only two yards off; but something kept her standing where she was, and she did not even reach out her hand to it.

The girls continued their conversation, and forgot all about the new-comer that Miss Finlayson had brought in. Most of them stood facing the fire and had not even looked at her; and the others, who glanced now and then towards the door, only shrugged their shoulders and wondered why the stupid child did not sit down, instead of standing still in that purposeless manner. They did not mean to be unkind, but how were they to know that she was fighting through her first disillusionment?

All at once, a diversion was made by two children from the other room, who came tumbling through the curtain and nearly upset a tall fair girl who was the centre of the group round the fire.

‘Look where you are going, Angela Wilkins!’ said the fair girl, sternly. ‘What are you children doing in here, I should like to know?’

‘Please, Margaret, don’t be cross, and do let me explain,’ begged Angela Wilkins, suppressing an inclination to giggle, and pouring out her words hastily. ‘Jean has had millions of letters from Jill Urquhart, and she says––’

‘It wasn’t millions, Angela, it was only one,’ corrected her fellow-culprit from behind.

‘And what business has Jean Murray to hear from Jill Urquhart?’ demanded the fair girl.

‘I’m sure I don’t want to hear from her,’ grumbled the other girl, whom Angela pushed forward to answer for herself. ‘She only writes to me when she wants something. I don’t call that writing to a person.’

‘She’s got a sister coming here this term, and she says everybody has got to look after her, or something like that,’ chimed in the irrepressible Angela.

‘It isn’t a sister, it’s a cousin. And she hasn’t asked everybody; I wish she had. She’s asked me to look after her, and that’s a very different thing,’ complained Jean Murray, looking distinctly aggrieved.

‘Yes,’ added Angela, breathlessly; ‘why should Jean be bothered with all the new girls who happen to be people’s cousins?’

‘She isn’t,’ said Margaret, curtly. ‘It’s only one new girl; and if she is a cousin of Jill’s, Jean ought to be very proud of being asked to look after her. Do stop exaggerating, Angela; and go away, both of you!’ Then just as the children slunk off subdued, she recalled them and made a gesture towards the door. ‘There’s a new girl over there now, I believe,’ she continued indifferently. ‘You’d better see whether she’s the right one; and if she is, bring her to me.’

She turned again to the fireplace, and the two girls made their way towards the other end of the room, where Barbara still stood unnoticed. She saw them coming, and heaved a sigh of relief. Things were a long while happening in this school; but it was something if they happened in the end. She glanced at their two faces as they came nearer, and felt disappointed when the one with the cross expression addressed her first.

‘I say, what’s your name?’ began Jean, ungraciously.

‘Barbara,’ answered the child, faintly. Her dream seemed more improbable than ever, in the presence of this small stranger with the aggressive manner.

‘Barbara what?’ asked Jean, impatiently.

Babs stared, and added her surname unwillingly. At home, when people spoke like that, they had to do without an answer.

‘That’s the one,’ grumbled Jean to her companion. Then she addressed Barbara again. ‘How old are you?’ she asked, in the same abrupt way.

‘Eleven,’ answered Babs, obediently. ‘How old are you?’

It was Jean’s turn to stare. ‘What business is it of yours?’ she exclaimed. After a moment’s consideration, however, she found a satisfactory reason for replying. ‘I’m a year older than you, anyhow,’ she added triumphantly, ‘so you’ll be the youngest in the school now, and you can take off the head girl’s boots.’

Before Barbara had time to realise this penalty, or privilege, belonging to her youth, Angela Wilkins, who had been silent for quite a surprising length of time, suddenly attacked her afresh. ‘Are you really Jill’s cousin?’ she asked, with a giggle.

Babs nodded; but Angela did not seem convinced. ‘You’re not a bit like her, are you? Jill Urquhart is so pretty and graceful and all that,’ she observed with engaging frankness, and then giggled again.

Barbara said nothing; it was certainly unnecessary to agree with such a very obvious statement. Jean Murray, who had also been examining her closely in her turn, evidently seemed to think a further snubbing was required of her.

‘You’re frightfully tall for your age,’ she remarked disapprovingly, as though Barbara were somehow to be held responsible for her height. ‘If I had straight spiky legs like yours, I should have my dresses made longer.’

‘No, you wouldn’t, if you had five brothers always wanting you to do things,’ retorted Barbara, promptly. It was saddening to find that, even here, people were prepared to make remarks about the slimness of her legs.

Angela was so surprised at her sudden show of resistance that she forgot to giggle.

‘I say, you’d better not speak like that to Jean Murray,’ she said in a warning tone, glancing as she spoke at Jean, as though she expected her to take immediate measures for the suppression of the new girl. ‘She’s been the youngest for so long that naturally she’s inclined to be jealous, now you’ve come to take her place. Of course she has to pretend she’s glad, but you can’t expect her to like the idea of somebody else taking off the head girl’s––’

‘Oh, if that’s all,’ said Barbara, indifferently, ‘I don’t want to take off anybody’s boots, thank you.’

‘You’ll have to, whether you like it or not,’ interposed Jean, who had been listening quite complacently to Angela’s description of her feelings. ‘Come along now, and see Margaret Hulme; and don’t be such a month about it, or else we shall catch it for stopping in here so long.’

‘Who is Margaret Hulme, and why have I got to go and see her?’ asked Babs, hanging back a little. It was so perplexing to have to do things without being given any reason for it.

Both the girls opened their eyes wide. ‘Why, she is the head girl!’ they explained, as if that were reason enough for anything; and without waiting for any more objections, they pulled her across the room to where the fair girl still made the centre of the group round the fire. She kept them waiting for some seconds before she condescended to notice that they were there.

‘Didn’t I tell you to go back to your own playroom?’ she demanded presently. Then her eyes fell on Barbara, and she scanned her critically up and down.

‘This is Jill Urquhart’s cousin,’ explained Jean, hurriedly, and she gave Barbara an unexpected push that sent her stumbling, with her usual lack of good fortune, right against the head girl.

‘Take care, child!’ said Margaret, frowning. And while Babs stammered out some apology, she turned to the other girls behind her and said something that made them all laugh.

‘She’s only eleven, though she’s so awfully tall; and her name is Barbara Berkeley,’ volunteered Angela, peering over the shoulder of the new girl.

‘Who spoke to you?’ inquired the head girl, sarcastically, looking back again. She once more scanned Barbara all over, and smiled in an annoying manner to herself. ‘However did Jill manage to have a cousin like you?’ she asked; and the other girls laughed more than before.

‘I don’t know,’ said Barbara, with a touch of scorn in her voice. The mysterious way in which the head girl and her admirers were laughing at her was very different from the frank teasing she was accustomed to; and it gave her a sudden wish to assert herself. ‘I never pretended to be like Jill, or like any of you! I–I don’t think I want to be like you, either. In my home, we don’t laugh behind people’s backs.’

She caused quite a small sensation in the group round the fire. One or two began to titter afresh, and then stopped, waiting for the head girl to take the lead. The head girl was equal to the occasion.

‘It is very certain, then, that you have stayed in your own home quite long enough,’ she remarked coldly, and resumed her conversation with her friends.

The two children dragged Barbara through the curtain into the next room.

‘Well, you have got some cheek!’ gasped Jean Murray, staring at her. ‘Lucky for you that you’re a new girl! If it had been me, Margaret Hulme wouldn’t have spoken to me for a whole day.’

The enormity of such a punishment did not for the moment impress Barbara much. What she did notice was that her passage of words with the head girl had broken the ice of her introduction to the junior playroom, especially with the aid of Angela’s highly coloured account of it.

‘You never saw such a thing!’ she was exclaiming rapidly to the circle that formed round her. ‘There was Margaret, looking like a dozen thunder-clouds rolled into one, and there was the new girl, grinning from ear to ear, not caring a bit what anybody thought of her and just standing up to the head girl as if she was in the First herself.’

The new girl barely recognised this description of herself; but as it made her an object of curiosity, if not of sympathy, in the junior playroom, she did not feel inclined to correct the picture that the red-haired, freckled little chatterbox was painting of her. Anything was better than being left out in the cold again. It struck her too that the girls in the junior room were far less inclined to laugh at her than the elder ones had seemed; and it raised her fallen spirits a little to find that the children who were now strolling up to her, with inquisitive glances at her hair, her clothes, and everything else about her, seemed disposed, in spite of their calm curiosity, to show her a kind of rough friendliness. They were more like boys, these smaller people in the junior playroom; and Barbara, though still failing to realise her child’s ideal of girls, felt a faint kinship with their straightforward method of addressing her.

‘No nickname?’ they asked, when she had again admitted her name and her age.

‘Oh, yes,’ answered Barbara, unsuspiciously, ‘the boys always call me the Babe, or––’

The peals of laughter that interrupted her puzzled her a good deal. It was very queer that, wherever she went, people always laughed at her. It was some moments before their glee over the nickname, that so exactly suited the childish impression she produced, began to subside.

‘Have you got a nurse?’ asked Angela, who had laughed louder than any one.

‘No,’ said Barbara, simply, not seeing that this too was meant to be a joke. ‘She left, two years ago.’

‘Well, you ought to have one,’ retorted Jean, brusquely. ‘She might teach you how to comb your hair.’

‘And let down your frock,’ added two or three voices together.

‘What’s the matter with my frock?’ asked Babs, opening her eyes. ‘It’s nearly two inches longer than any frock I ever had before.’

The laughter began afresh, and Barbara gave up trying to explain things. She was a little hurt, in reality, and was afraid of showing it; for it would never do, after being teased by five brothers all her life, to be ruffled by the laughter of a few schoolgirls. All the same, there was something in their way of laughing at her that hurt, and she did not care to provoke them into doing it any more.

The loud ringing of a bell brought her a sudden respite, by clearing the room of her tormentors. They poured hastily out of two large doors, that slid back in the wall and revealed another square hall beyond, similar to the one at the front of the house. The wide staircase up which the girls were trooping evidently led to their bedrooms, for Barbara, left deserted and forgotten in the playroom, could hear them, directly afterwards, moving about overhead. As she waited there alone, wondering what she was supposed to do next, Jean Murray came hurrying back into the room and looked round for her.

‘Oh, bother!’ she said, in her ungracious manner; ‘what a nuisance you are! I wish you’d do things without waiting to be told.’

Babs explained submissively that she was quite ready to do things if she only knew what to do; but Jean still grumbled.

‘Any one with any sense would know,’ she declared, hastening out of the door again as she spoke. When she was half-way across the hall, she shouted, without looking back, ‘Can’t you come along? There’s only a quarter of an hour to dress for supper.’

Babs hurried after her, and managed to keep her in sight up the wide staircase and along the gallery at the top. There were doors all round the gallery, and at one of these, marked number twelve, Jean stopped and waited impatiently.

‘What a time you are,’ she complained, when Barbara caught her up.

‘I’m very quick, when anybody doesn’t take such an enormous start,’ answered Barbara, panting. ‘I can beat Peter twice round the Square and up to the gate, easily! And you’re not in it with Peter.’

Jean looked at her, and her expression was not a pretty one. However, she only jerked her head at the door in front of them, and told Babs it was her bedroom. ‘Finny said I was to show you,’ she added. ‘Don’t know, I’m sure, why everybody thinks I’ve got to show you things. And you’d better look sharp and dress, because when you’re ready you’ve got to cut along to number two and do the head girl’s hair. It’s always the business of the youngest in the school to do the head girl’s hair. See?’

‘But I don’t know how to do anybody’s hair,’ began Barbara, in a fever of dismay. But Jean had already scampered out of hearing; and with her responsibilities weighing heavily upon her, the new girl turned the handle of her bedroom door and went forlornly in. It was a simple little room, very clean and fresh-looking, with everything there that she wanted and nothing that she could do without. The pretty coverlets on the bed and the dressing-table and the muslin curtains that draped the oaken window-sash gave it a look of homely comfort, while harmonising with the plain green colour of the walls and the blue frieze and carpet. As Barbara walked across her small domain and pushed aside the blind to peep out into the clear starlit night, a moment’s rest came to her perturbed little mind. The tiny bare room was all hers, and the feeling of privacy and possession was very comforting.

A door in the wall told her there was a room leading out of hers, and the sound made by some one moving rapidly about in it reminded her again of her present woes and of the necessity for dressing as quickly as possible. Her relief at not being obliged to sleep with the other girls was forgotten in her returning consciousness of having to live with them, and to do their hair and to button their boots. With desperate haste she struggled out of her serge frock and into a muslin one, that had a strange new method of fastening that was extremely baffling; and five minutes later, trembling, uneasy, and flushed with the hurry of her speedy toilet, she stood knocking at the door of number two.

‘It’s me,’ she said feebly, in response to the curt inquiry from within. Her inadequate explanation was followed by a few quick steps on the other side of the door, which was then flung open with an impatient movement; and the head girl, putting hairpins rapidly into her hair as she stood, was looking down at her sternly.

‘You should go to one of the younger ones, if you want to know anything,’ she said crossly. ‘Where’s Jean Murray?’

‘It was Jean Murray who told me to come,’ answered the child, looking a pathetic little object in her half-fastened muslin frock, with her hair standing out wildly round her head. ‘I’m sure I didn’t want to come; I don’t know how to do anybody’s hair; I told her so. But she said it was because I was the youngest, and––’

‘What are you talking about, child?’ interrupted Margaret. Her mystified look was lost on Babs, however, as the child stared down in much misery and confusion at the little steel buckles on her new evening shoes. She went on unhappily with her stammering confession.

‘She said I’d got to do the head girl’s hair because I was the youngest, and I was to make haste, or I shouldn’t be in time. I did make as much haste as I could, truthfully,’ she added, looking up timidly at her frowning questioner; ‘but there were such a lot of hooks on my new frock, and I’m not used to hooks. I’ve always had buttons before, you see.’

One or two of the neighbouring doors had opened by this time, and quite a small audience was assembling to hear Barbara’s attempt at explanation. A giggle that swelled into a laugh brought dismay once more into her heart; and a suspicion that she had been hoaxed slowly dawned upon her.

‘Isn’t it true?’ she cried, turning upon them desperately. ‘Haven’t I got to do the head girl’s hair?’

‘You’d better do your own first, I should say,’ observed one of the onlookers, carelessly; and the others laughed again.

The head girl silenced them peremptorily. ‘Don’t, Ruth!’ she said. ‘It’s only a babe, after all. You others had better go downstairs; the supper-bell will ring directly.’

The gallery slowly emptied itself, except for the little group of three that still stood outside the head girl’s door. The offending Ruth turned to Barbara; she had a good-natured face, and was looking penitent.

‘Come here, child, and let me fasten your frock properly,’ she said; ‘you’ve done it up all wrong.’

Barbara turned her back to her willingly. ‘It’s awfully bricky of you,’ she said warmly; ‘I’ve never done up my own frock before, and this one was so complicated, somehow.’

‘You must come to me when you want your frocks fastened,’ answered her new friend. ‘I sleep next door to you, and I always help Angela, whose room is on the farther side of mine. You’ve only got to tap at the door between, when you are ready. But you mustn’t speak in the morning before breakfast, or in the evening after prayers, because that is against the rules.’