‘She never knew we were coming, till we came,’ added another voice. ‘We made up the plan because we heard she was jolly unhappy.’

‘We couldn’t possibly let her be unhappy another minute, or else we might have waited till Auntie Anna came back,’ chimed in a third.

Then followed a disappointed cry in Robin’s shrill tones. ‘But isn’t she going to escape, after all?’

Miss Finlayson waited till they had finished speaking, and her large clear eyes were brimming over with fun.

‘Of course she is going to escape, if she wants to,’ answered the head-mistress; ‘but at present she seems to be in some doubt about the matter. Supposing you come in and wait by the fire, while she thinks it over. You might help her, perhaps, to make up her mind. Will you climb through the window, or shall I unbolt the front door?’

Naturally, a rescue party five strong could not do anything so tame as to walk through a front door; so although the window was four or five feet from the ground, Robin was hoisted up first by Peter’s strong arms, and then they all scrambled after him, one by one, till the little procession was ready to follow Babs and her captor into the warm, cosy study. Certainly, no one could have said that Miss Finlayson’s room looked stiff or austere at night, when the curtains were drawn and the fire had burned down to a rich red glow.

There was something like an uncomfortable pause, as soon as they found themselves assembled there, with the light full on their faces. It was true that the expedition had not failed, and that the Babe was as free to escape now as she had been before Miss Finlayson came upon the scene; but, for all that, none of them could help feeling that Miss Finlayson, so far, had the game in her own hands, and that they were only making themselves look ridiculous. For they could all see that her face was overflowing with merriment, as she stooped down and poked the fire into a blaze.

Egbert cleared his throat, and tried to relieve the awkwardness of the position by making some sort of an apology. He knew quite well that, being the eldest, he ought to have suppressed the plot in the very beginning.

‘I am afraid you will think us rather mad,’ he began, ‘but the Babe’s letter put us all on our mettle; and we thought–that is, some of us thought she ought to be rescued. Of course, we hadn’t seen you then,’ he added desperately. Any apology for the rescue party certainly involved the most unflattering insinuations about his hostess; and Egbert in his confusion thought exceedingly bitter things about Kit and Peter, who had dragged him against his will on this wild adventure.

‘It was awfully nice of you to think of me,’ murmured Barbara, but her tone was not so enthusiastic as it might have been. If only Finny would stop being so obliging about it, she was sure she would find it so much easier to run away.

‘Exceedingly nice!’ echoed Miss Finlayson, warmly. ‘I am only sorry there should be this delay in carrying out your plan. However, that is no reason why we should not have something to eat, while Barbara is making up her mind. It must be nearly midnight, and I am starving. Will one of you come and help me to forage?

Egbert volunteered, with a feeling of relief at having something to do; and he followed her out of the room. The moment the door closed, the children’s tongues were loosed.

‘Dear, dear Babs,’ cried Robin, dancing round her gleefully; ‘you will come away from the horrid, cross old thing, won’t you?’

‘Finny isn’t cross, Bobbin; it’s the others,’ remonstrated Babs.

‘Why, of course you’re coming, aren’t you?’ said Peter, who was impatient to have done with this inaction and to carry out the glorious rescue they had planned. The worst of it was that half its gloriousness seemed to have subsided before the pleasant manners of the head-mistress.

‘I should think she was coming, indeed!’ declared Wilfred. ‘You don’t suppose I’m going to lose two hours of bed for nothing, do you?’

Christopher, who had been silently observing Barbara all the while, shook his head slowly. ‘She won’t come,’ he said gruffly. ‘They’ve made her different already.’

A vague feeling of uneasiness crept over Barbara. Kit was always right; was she different already? She gave herself an involuntary shake. ‘Never mind about me!’ she exclaimed. ‘Tell me about Crofts, and what you’ve been doing since I left, and––everything. Do you mean to say your cold is better already, Kit?’

‘Ah!’ Wilfred hastened to tell her; ‘that’s because of the new doctor.’

‘There’s a new doctor just settled in this part of the world,’ explained Peter. ‘Your Finny thinks an awful lot of him, and that’s why Auntie Anna sent for him last night, when Kit got bad, instead of going to the old-fashioned chap who lives round the corner at Crofts. We don’t think anything of him at all, though; do we, boys?’

‘He is a funny man,’ commented Robin.

‘He’s a beast,’ said Kit, conclusively.

‘He’s a clever beast, anyway,’ protested Wilfred, feeling bound to support the profession. ‘He’s done you an awful lot of good already, Kit, and he lets you go out as much as you like. It’s the modern treatment, or something.’

‘Why is he a beast, Kit?’ asked Barbara, sympathetically. The world had convinced her so strongly, since yesterday afternoon, of its possibilities in the way of beasts, that she felt sure Kit was right about it.

‘He grunts at you as though you weren’t fit to speak to; and he isn’t a bit sorry for you, as old Browne used to be, but he seems to think you are making it all up,’ said Christopher, in an injured tone.

‘He doesn’t like boys; that’s at the bottom of it,’ added Peter. ‘He looked black as thunder because we were rotting in the library with Kit, and he cleared us all out before he’d even look at his tongue.’

‘And he never sent for a silver spoon, nor nothing,’ cried Robin, in much excitement. ‘How did he ’xamine your throat, Kit, if he hadn’t got a silver spoon?’

‘Shoved a thing like a skewer down, that he took out of his pocket,’ said Kit, contemptuously. ‘His pocket was full of rotten skewers and things.’

‘That’s the modern treatment,’ said Wilfred again.

‘Modern treatment be hanged!’ remarked Peter, with a laugh. ‘Jill hates him too; he treated her as if she was about ten years old.’

‘Jill’s furious because Auntie Anna has asked him to dinner next week; and we shall have gone back by then, so she’ll have him to herself all the evening,’ chuckled Wilfred.

‘How is Jill?’ asked Barbara, as soon as she could get in a word.

There was a little pause. ‘She’s all right,’ said Christopher, indifferently, after a moment or two.

‘Kit likes her awfully,’ proclaimed Robin, with his head on one side.

‘So does Peter,’ added Christopher, hastily. ‘He was awfully gone on her this morning, because she mended his cap when no one was looking.’

‘I don’t think she means to be young-ladyish, really,’ remarked Wilfred, patronisingly. ‘Last night, when you kids had gone to bed, she sang to Egbert and me. She can sing!’

‘Now, why didn’t she sing to us before?’ demanded Peter. ‘That’s where she’s so awfully rum.’

‘She hasn’t been properly trained, that’s all,’ said Christopher.

‘Why, she’s studied under the best master in Paris!’ interrupted Wilfred.

‘You goat! I meant her, not her singing,’ snapped Christopher.

‘Oh, well, we all know why you like her,’ retorted Wilfred. ‘It’s because she came and sucked up to you by offering to read aloud to you, before Dr. Hurst said you might go––’

‘I never said I did like her,’ disputed Kit.

The door opened before they settled the matter; and the foraging party returned, laden with spoil.

‘I brought everything I could find that looked interesting,’ announced the head-mistress. ‘You must be ravenous after riding all that way; and I’m sure I am, though I’ve done nothing but sit by the fire all the evening and make time-tables. You might clear them out of the way for me, will you, Robin? And you, Wilfred, can move the other things on to the floor, or anywhere else you like. Will you hold this tray, Peter, while I lay the cloth? No, I don’t want you, Christopher, thank you. Can’t you see that Babs is bubbling over with news for you? Go and keep her company by the fire till supper is ready.’

It was very queer that she should know all their names like that, and Egbert declared afterwards that he did not think he had told her anything about them, though somehow she had kept him talking all the time they were foraging in the larder. She had found out as much as she wanted to know, however, and she found out a good deal more before supper was over. There was something about her that made them all talk to her as if she were an old friend of theirs instead of the stern jailer whom they had come to defy. Not that she allowed them for all that to have the conversation to themselves, for she chatted away herself as busily as possible; and she made jokes about her impromptu supper until even Egbert felt at his ease.

‘Can any one cut up his chicken without a knife?’ she asked. ‘There’s a knife short, but it doesn’t do to be too particular on an occasion of this sort, does it? Ah, of course, you have one in your pocket, Peter; I am used to girls, you see, and a girl never has anything in her pocket except a handkerchief, and that is generally half out of it. Now, who is going to carve the beef? Not I, indeed! I have carved the beef in this household for twelve years, and you needn’t suppose I’m going to miss such an opportunity as this of being idle. Do you know, there have never been five gentlemen together at my table since I became a schoolmistress? Think of that, Barbara, and do not wonder that I know more about girls than tomboys. I’m sorry there isn’t a salad, but there’s real chutnee from Bombay and not the other place–wherever that may be. An old pupil sends me my chutnee; and I always keep it for grand occasions, like this and the break-up party. Will you come to our next break-up party? That depends, I suppose, on whether Babs stops here or not. Ah, well, she will have made up her mind by that time, won’t she? I’m afraid I must forbid you cold pie, Kit, it’s poison to asthma; besides, here are real, stiff, stewed pears. Don’t you like stewed pears that are stewed stiff?’

Barbara sat on the hearthrug with Kit, and she tried hard to determine whether she should run away or not. With Finny revealing herself in this wonderful new light, and Kit sitting beside her in the comfortable firelight and sharing her plateful of stewed pears, the problem was more than she could solve for herself. If this was school, she should like to stay here always; and if it wasn’t, well, she felt too lazy in the present delicious state of things to worry herself any more about it.

Supper came to an end at last, and Miss Finlayson glanced at the clock. Egbert took the hint, and pulled Christopher away from the bookshelves, which he had begun greedily to examine.

‘I think we must be going,’ said the eldest of the five, politely; and then he stopped short. The absurdity of the situation upset his dignity again, and he stood there fingering his cap nervously.

‘What about Babs?’ asked Miss Finlayson; and her eyes twinkled and shone till one might almost have supposed them to be filled with tears.

The boys looked towards the fireplace; but Miss Finlayson was standing in front of it, and the little figure in the pink dressing-gown was hidden from view. The head-mistress, at all events, had come to the conclusion that the problem was too difficult for Barbara to solve.

‘Yes, what about the Babe?’ said Egbert, glancing round at the others.

‘We did come to rescue her,’ maintained Peter, ‘and I do think––’

‘Isn’t Babs coming?’ interrupted Robin, in tones of amazement. It seemed a great waste of time to come all this way, and not to rescue anybody in the end. Of course, there was the supper to be taken into consideration; but it would be contrary to all precedent in the Berkeley family, if the boys were to let themselves be influenced by supper.

‘She’d be an idiot if she did come,’ muttered Wilfred, under his breath. He, undoubtedly, had been influenced by the supper.

Christopher pushed a chair on one side with a quick, impatient movement. ‘She won’t come,’ he said once more. Then he caught a look from his hostess, and reddened slightly. ‘Perhaps she had better stay,’ he added, with an effort.

‘Thank you, Kit,’ said Miss Finlayson, with a nod and a smile at him. Then she turned to the others again. The look of amusement never left her face once. ‘Will some one ask the Babe what she feels about the matter?’ she suggested.

She moved on one side to give them the opportunity. But the question was never put. Babs had stopped trying to make up her mind; and the little girl in the pink dressing-gown was lying curled up on the hearthrug, fast asleep.

CHAPTER VIII
THE DISENCHANTMENT OF A BEAST

Barbara was stretched, face downwards, on the floor of the junior playroom. It was Wednesday evening, about ten days after the rescue party had invaded Wootton Beeches; and she was trying, with the aid of much ink and a footstool for a writing-desk, to answer Kit’s last two letters, and to send him all the news she had accumulated since that important occasion. Over her head buzzed the desultory conversation of her fifty-five companions, who still gloried in ignoring her; but she heeded them no more than they had come to heed the unconscious little person who lay stretched at their feet. It was really only a habit with them, by this time, to ignore the new girl; for most of them had quite forgotten the fancied grievance they had originally cherished against her for her defiance of their favourite, Jean Murray. Indeed, if it had not been for the fear of Jean’s scorn and Jean’s tongue, they would undoubtedly have made friends with her days ago. With the best intentions in the world, it was not easy to go on avoiding some one who never seemed to notice that she was being avoided; and most of them wished secretly that Jean Murray would ‘come round.’ But whatever Jean felt about it, she showed no intention outwardly of coming round. Whenever she found herself alone with a picked audience, she seized the opportunity to inflame them and herself afresh, by recalling the evil behaviour of Barbara over the head girl’s boots, pointing out how, by a tissue of deceit, the offender had wormed herself into Margaret’s favour, to the exclusion of other worthier members of the junior playroom–notably of Jean Murray herself. ‘You’ve only got to see how little she cares, and that will show you what a wicked mind she’s got,’ was the kind of sentence that usually wound up one of these inflammatory addresses; and after that, the junior playroom would redouble its coolness towards Barbara Berkeley. But Barbara Berkeley persisted in going her own way cheerfully, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to live with fifty-five companions who never spoke to her; and the situation in the junior playroom threatened to become too absurd to be maintained.

Babs dropped her pen, and picked up one of Kit’s letters for reference. She had so much to say to him and so little time to say it in, that she was afraid of leaving some of his questions unanswered. Kit’s neat and precisely written epistle was a great contrast to her own blotted and smudged production; and Barbara sighed as she realised how much he managed to say in a few words, while she expended far more time and ink and energy, without expressing half as much as she wanted to tell him.

‘Dear Babe,’ Kit had written–‘This is to tell you that we got home safely from the great Midnight Rescue Party, though of course I caught a chill and had to have that beast Hurst again. I’ll tell you presently how Jill ragged him, though; and that was well worth being ill for. But first of all I have to inform you what we all think is for your good in the present crisis of your fortunes. (That means, now you are at school.) Of course we are much afflicted to hear that you are not happy, and of course we are not surprised to hear you do not like girls. (Nobody could, except Egbert, and he doesn’t really, only he pretends he does because of that chap’s sister last holidays. That’s what has done for Egbert, and it’s a great pity, but what we must expect at his age, so it’s no use vociferating about it.) But to resume–we are all agreed that the best thing you can do is to stop where you are until the period of probation is over (that means till you’ve done being at school). You see, it is only for three months at a time, and we are here in the holidays. It would be indescribable and unprecedented (which means beastly, and awful, and things like that) if you had to live with girls in the vacation too. But you are spared this, and it is your duty to be thankful for every crumb of comfort that is to be substracted from the situation. (Besides, you are a girl yourself; you can’t get over that though you mayn’t like the idea, and you’ve got to go on being a girl till you’re a woman. It’s something to feel that it can’t last for ever, and that in the end you will be able to be a woman, like Nurse and Auntie Anna; and there’s nothing the matter with them, is there?) If your temporary indisposition only cures your spelling it will be money well spent, for your spelling, my dear Babe, as father once said, is both original and varied. So cheer up, and remember that Jill is but a girl too, and that she is quite passable for one of that slack and wayward sex. (Even when she is most like a girl I find I can bear with her. For instance, when I lammented the other day that the rescue party had been a frost, she said, “Why, you couldn’t have bicycled unless it had been, could you? Listen to the rain, now!”) The post is going, so I must infer the description of how Jill ragged the doctor till next time. Meanwhile, cultivate the endurance for which English women have ever been renowned; that is the result of the codgitations of the council we held before the others went back to school.–Your affectionate brother,     Christopher Berkeley.

‘P.S.–I’m not quite sure about the m’s in lammenting; it looks rum somehow, but there isn’t a dictionary, so I must leave it.   C.’

His other letter was much longer, and had evidently been written straight off without the elaborate care that he had given to the composition of the first one. As Babs read it, she pictured him sitting as he always did, perched on a high chair at the writing-table, with his legs curled under him and his nose very close to the paper; and suddenly, the deadly feeling of home-sickness she had been battling with for days came over her again.

‘This is the true account,’ she read, through a suspicious mist in her eyes, ‘of how Jill ragged the doctor, when he came to dine with us, the day after the boys went back. Of course, Auntie Anna didn’t know he was a beast, so she couldn’t be blamed for asking him; but Jill and I much regretted the circumstance. Robin grumbled and said he wished he was old enough to sit up to dinner and have courses and courses and courses, but that’s his beastly greediness, as I pointed out to him, and he doesn’t know what it is to get a white tie under a filthy clean collar and then an Eton coat under that and to wash your teeth extra instead of only in the morning. But Jill came in and tied it, which was something, and she even did it better than Nurse, who used to make you feel sick by grinding her knuckles into your throat all the time. Having prepared ourselves for the awful holocaust we then proceeded downstairs. (Perhaps you won’t be able to understand all the words in this letter, but it’s too good a joke to be spoilt by making it easy for you, so you must do your best.) Jill had an awfully decent pink sort of thing on, and it had rows of fringe that you could tie into knots without her rotting you for doing it. Well, to come to the real matter of my discourse, we found the doctor in the drawing-room, also the old Rector, who is called Barnaby and is too old to count much, and besides Auntie Anna likes him so we mean to extend to him the charm of our companionship. And the Rector took in Auntie Anna, and the Beast took in Jill, and I followed behind feeling rotten. You don’t know how rotten it is, when you are an odd one like that and nobody wants you in their conversation. You see there were two conversations all the time, Auntie’s conversation with the old boy about tithes and rent charges and things that are not suited to my intellect, and Jill’s conversation with the doctor which wasn’t a conversation at all because he wouldn’t talk. He sat and glowered at his plate like a cat would, and if he lifted his eyes by accident and caught one of us staring at him, he looked down again as if he’d been shot. His conduct was most unaccountable and reprehensible as I pointed out to Jill afterwards, and she said, “Yes,” and grinned. I was greatly incensed with him for giving her so much bother, because she worked hard at him and never got cross once, and she asked him about the village and about the poor people and about abroad, and all those grown-up things, and the Beast said “Yes” and “No” and “Certainly,” till I wanted to kick him. I tried to help Jill once or twice by tossing off one of my polite rejoinders, but he only behaved as if I wasn’t there and looked more like a poker than ever. That was what put Jill’s monkey up. She couldn’t stand his indifference and acidity to me, so she began to rag him and that shows that she is in reality a brick though forced to maskerade as a girl. (That’s another word you don’t know perhaps but it’s in the dictionary.) She smiled at him as perky as you please and she said in that soft-cotton-wolly voice of hers, “Is there anything that does interest you, Dr. Hurst?” And when the Beast was so bowled over that he nearly dropped his knife and fork, she just went on and explained how funny it was to sit all the evening with some one who didn’t want to talk, and didn’t he think so too? I wanted to break out into paeons of triumph in order to express my satisfaction at the turn matters were taking, but I restrained my impetuosity in time and waited for the Beast to speak. He stuttered rather and began chopping up the pear on his plate as if it was for Christmas puddings, and then he said he didn’t suppose any young people were interested in what he was interested in (which shows that all the while he lumped Jill and me together as kids and not fit to associate with him). Then Jill asked him what he was interested in, and he said “Bac–” (this is the longest word of all and I’m afraid you won’t find it in the dictionary, at any rate not in the way I’m going to spell it) “Bacterioi–” oh hang! here goes again–“Bacteriollodgy.” Then Auntie Anna winked at Jill, and we went upstairs and left the Beast with the Rector, which was a punishment he more than deserved, as I told Jill. She said she was afraid we boys were spoiling her manners, and Auntie said, “Of course they are!” as if it was a good thing, which of course we know it is. I had to go to bed then, and Jill said it was awful desolation and despair when I’d gone, because Auntie Anna began her conversation all over again with old Barnaby, and the Beast instead of having the sense to join in it went and sat with Jill all the evening. Which shows his puerrility and blightedness. She sang to him too, and he got up to go the moment she had finished which was beastly rude, I think. If he did think she sang badly he might have played up better. But he’s a beast, and you can’t get over that. He’s very ugly and sulky looking, and he’s about fifty I should think, but Jill says not so old. That’s her grown-up charitableness which she can’t get over. Anyhow––’

The mist in Barbara’s eyes threatened to become so serious at this point that she put down Kit’s letter hastily and returned to her own. Whatever happened, she was not going to cry before all these girls, who never understood anything she did. She was hard at work again by the time Ruth Oliver pushed aside the curtain and looked in from the next room.

‘Barbara Berkeley!’ she called. ‘Has any one seen Barbara Berkeley?’

One or two of the girls looked round casually at the slim figure on the floor, but nobody roused her. Ruth Oliver was too good-natured a person to inspire much authority in the junior playroom, and the children would sooner risk her displeasure any day than Jean Murray’s. If it had been any other girl in the First, half a dozen of them would have hastened to do her bidding at once.

‘Angela!’ called Ruth, impatiently, coming into the room as she spoke; ‘don’t you know where the Babe is? She has got to go and see the doctor at once.’

On the other side of the curtain, both Barbara and her nickname met with the popularity that was denied to them in the junior playroom; and the note of familiarity in the elder girl’s words sent Angela’s impudent chin up in the air.

‘We don’t know anybody of that name in here,’ she said, and went on talking flippantly to the girl beside her.

Ruth Oliver was not born to be a leader, and she was horribly afraid of some of the younger ones, who had been quick enough to detect this long ago, and naturally presumed upon it. But there were limits even to her endurance, and she laid a stern hand on Angela’s shoulder.

‘If you don’t want to be reported to Margaret Hulme, you’d better fetch Barbara to me at once,’ she commanded, with a firmness she certainly did not feel.

Angela rose with a very bad grace, and strolled as slowly as she dared to the other end of the room. ‘If you’d only said that at first, it would have saved all this fuss!’ she muttered, as soon as she was at a safe distance.

Babs still lay face downwards on the floor, with her heels in the air and her whole attention fixed on the paper she was covering with her large round handwriting. If she did not finish her letter before the prayer-bell rang, it would have to wait until next Wednesday. So she did not take any notice when some one came and said something or another in her ear. She was always in somebody’s way, and if she moved, she would only be in somebody else’s way. So she stayed where she was.

‘Don’t you hear? You’ve got to go and see the doctor,’ repeated Angela, loudly and with impatience. Thoughtless and empty-headed as she was, even Angela Wilkins had the sense to see how absurd it was that the new girl should turn on her persecutors by ignoring them.

Barbara rolled over on her side and glanced up at her.

‘Oh, all right! I know how much of that to believe,’ she answered; and she rolled back again into her old position and continued her letter to Kit.

‘She says she doesn’t want to see the stupid doctor, and nothing will induce her to come, and she doesn’t care what you say or anybody else either,’ was Angela’s version, on her return to Ruth Oliver, of the way in which Barbara had received her message.

The elder girl looked down at her suspiciously. ‘Did she really say that?’ she inquired.

‘Go and ask her, that’s all,’ cried Angela, full of righteous indignation at having her word doubted. For she was really under the impression that she had correctly described the attitude of the new girl towards the doctor and Ruth Oliver.

‘Well, I will,’ answered Ruth, and she threaded her way among the girls until she too stood over the prostrate figure of the offender.

‘Babs,’ she called, bending down.

Barbara flourished her black legs in the air with an impatient movement. ‘How you do bother!’ she complained, stifling a sigh. ‘That’s the second in five minutes. Why can’t you leave me alone?’

There was a start of surprise in the group that surrounded her. It is probable that few of her listeners saw the ridiculous side of the new girl’s request to be left alone, when that was the punishment that had been meted out to her ever since her second day at school; but any one of them could have told her that that was not the way to speak to a girl in the First.

Ruth turned a little red from sheer nervousness; and the girls immediately decided that she was afraid of the youngest child in the school, and began to giggle with one accord. Barbara sighed again at this new interruption; and raising herself on her knees, she sat back on her heels.

‘Oh, it’s you!’ she observed, shaking the hair out of her eyes. ‘Why didn’t you say so? I thought it was just some one who wanted to bother.’

‘You’ve got to go and see the doctor in Finny’s study. Make haste, Babe,’ said Ruth, who was smarting under the giggle, and wanted to get back into the other room among her equals. But the Babe showed no signs of making haste.

‘Why have I got to see the doctor?’ she asked, opening her eyes. ‘I’m not ill or anything; and I want to finish my letter home. Don’t you think it’s a mistake?’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Ruth, forgetting her nervousness all at once, and lifting the child boldly off the floor. ‘You’ve got to be examined to see if you can do gymnastics, that’s all. He’s in Finny’s study, waiting for you.’ She carried her playfully under her arm and set her down on the further side of the curtain. Whatever the other tiresome children might think of her, she knew that the Babe never criticised her, and that gave her confidence.

Barbara was still a little dubious about the sense of seeing a doctor when she did not feel ill; but she trotted across the hall obediently and went into Finny’s study. She was only half conscious of what she was doing, for she had been taken from her letter too abruptly to have had time to wake up properly; and Babs always required plenty of time to wake up, when she had been absorbed in anything. So the solemn-looking young man, who sat in the low arm-chair, was a little upset when she not only gave him her hand to shake but also put up her face to be kissed as a matter of course.

Dr. Wilson Hurst, in spite of Kit’s idea of his age, was only twenty-eight and quite young enough to feel extremely bashful. He jerked back his head suddenly; and Barbara woke up.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ she said, smiling. ‘I wasn’t thinking. Of course you don’t want to be kissed; I shouldn’t have dreamed of kissing you at home, you know, because the boys feel just like you about kissing. But Ruth kisses me such lots, and everybody seems to kiss everybody else here, so I suppose I’ve rather got into the way of––’

Here Miss Finlayson said ‘Hush!’ very softly; and the doctor pulled something so queer and interesting out of his pocket at the same time, that Barbara forgot everything else. ‘What are you going to do with that funny thing? Is it a speaking-tube?’ she asked curiously.

‘I’m going to see whether your heart is in the right place,’ answered the doctor, and he was immediately so overcome at his stupendous levity in making a joke over a medical examination, that he did not speak another word till it was completed. As for Babs, she was immensely interested the whole time, and never took her bright little eyes off his face once.

‘Is it in the right place?’ she asked him, when he put the queer-looking thing back in his pocket again.

‘Yes,’ said the doctor, briefly.

‘Is anybody’s in the wrong place?’ pursued Babs, leaning against his knee in the most friendly way imaginable.

‘Sometimes,’ said the doctor. He marvelled at himself for not feeling more irritated by her, when as a rule he found children so worrying.

‘Is yours in the right place?’ persisted Barbara.

‘I–I hope so,’ said the doctor, struggling with a grim smile.

‘Same place as mine?’ continued Barbara, eagerly.

Miss Finlayson put out her hand to stop her; but Babs did not see. The doctor saw, and did not take any notice.

‘I imagine it is in the same place,’ he said feebly.

‘But how do you know, unless some one else finds it for you?’ inquired Babs. ‘You can’t listen to your own heart through that funny thing, can you?’

‘N–no, some one else has to find it,’ admitted the doctor, and she supposed he had remembered something that made him feel shy, for he coloured furiously and rose to his feet rather hurriedly.

Babs stood gazing up at him attentively, while he exchanged parting words with Miss Finlayson. ‘It’s an awful pity you didn’t go to see Kit when he was ill,’ she remarked, directly there was an opportunity. ‘Kit’s doctor was a beast.’

The long oval face turned slightly red again; and Miss Finlayson said something very quickly about the wet evening.

‘Yes,’ replied the doctor, stammering a little; ‘I am sorry the evening is so late,–so wet, I mean, and that I am so late in calling–positively the first minute I’ve had to-day,–extremely busy this time of year––’

A hand was stealing inside his, and he had to stop and look down again. ‘Do you think you could go and see Kit next time he is ill?’ asked Babs, appealingly. ‘It isn’t nice to have a beast for a doctor, when you’re ill, is it?’

The doctor went on looking down at her with an odd sort of smile on his face. ‘That reminds me,’ he said–though how it reminded him the child could not for the moment imagine–‘that your cousin Miss Urquhart charged me with a message for you. She sent you her love and promised to write soon. I hope I have given it correctly.’

‘Oh!’ cried Barbara, with great excitement. ‘Do you know Jill?’ The doctor kept hold of her hand and nodded. ‘And Auntie Anna? And the boys–all of them? Then you must know Kit!’

‘Yes,’ said Dr. Hurst, grimly. ‘I was the beast.’

Then he stooped and kissed her cheek very stiffly, as if he were not used to kissing people; and then he went away. Like Ruth Oliver, he had found it difficult to feel nervous of the youngest girl in the school.

Barbara climbed on the window-seat, and flattened her nose against the window-pane, and watched the lamps of the doctor’s trap receding down the drive. ‘I like doctors; don’t you, Miss Finlayson?’ she inquired, when that lady came back into the study.

Miss Finlayson agreed that she liked doctors very much indeed, and she began to write something in a big book, while Babs knelt on the window-seat and stared out into the rain and the darkness. Suddenly she jumped down from her perch with a cry of dismay.

‘What’s the matter now?’ asked the head-mistress, absently.

‘I must have called him a beast!’ gasped Barbara.

‘I think I heard something like it,’ observed Miss Finlayson, still writing.

‘But–but I didn’t mean that he was a beast,’ proceeded Barbara, looking distressed. ‘I meant that somebody else was a beast. It wasn’t my fault that somebody else was him, was it, Miss Finlayson?’

‘It would be safer, I think, and perhaps a little more considerate, not to call anybody a beast,’ remarked the head-mistress, gravely. ‘Then these little mistakes would be avoided.’

‘I never will again,’ sighed Babs. ‘It’s such a particular pity, because he isn’t a bit like a real beast, is he?’

Miss Finlayson looked up while she dried the page she had just written. ‘Have you finished your letters home?’ she inquired pleasantly. ‘The prayer-bell will ring in about a quarter of an hour.’

The reminder sent Barbara straight out of the room, and she sped swiftly back across the hall, thinking busily. Clearly, the only reparation she could make to the doctor was to transform him from a beast into a fairy prince, and to offer him a place in her fairy kingdom; but he would be rather lonely there without a princess, she feared, and she herself already belonged to Kit. It was always easier to find princes than princesses, and she did wish that Finny would not wear a cap and scrape her hair back so tidily–two things which disqualified her, in spite of her niceness, from being a princess in anybody’s kingdom. However, perhaps he would not mind doing without a princess just at first; and in time she might be able to find some one who was neither silly nor unkind, and would be worthy of a crown and the companionship of a disenchanted beast.

At this point in her reflections Barbara reached the door of the senior playroom, and the sight of the elder girls, as they busied themselves with their weekly correspondence, reminded her again of her letter to Kit. For the moment, as far as she was concerned, her new prince would have to whistle for a princess.

CHAPTER IX
THE BABE’S ‘FURY’

‘That’s where her artfulness comes in,’ declared Jean. She thought she heard her rival’s voice on the other side of the curtain, and jealousy made her more bitter than before. ‘If you ask me, I believe she only pretends not to notice any of us, so as to pick up everything she can; and then she goes and sneaks it all to the elder ones.’

‘Oh, Jean!’ remonstrated Charlotte.

Jean looked a tiny bit ashamed of herself. It was not nearly so easy to say unkind things about the new girl as it had been a week ago. All the same, her unhappiness at the continued coldness of Margaret Hulme was quite genuine, and it hurt her sorely to think that the head girl was now smiling on the interloper as she used to smile upon her.

‘Well, it’s true!’ she vowed. ‘I vote we don’t leave her alone, or give her the chance of mocking at us, any more. She wants to be taught that she’s the youngest girl in the school, and that it isn’t anything to be cocky about. Anybody who likes can make up to her, as the big girls do; but I am going to see that she keeps in her place.’

‘What a fuss to make about an innocent brat like that,’ remarked Charlotte, smiling scornfully. ‘It’s jealousy, because Margaret is kind to her: that’s all it is!’

That was decidedly what it was, but it did not soothe Jean’s temper to be told so in this blunt manner; and by the time her rival came in from the seniors’ room, the enemy had been worked up into a fine state of resentment against her. Unconscious as ever that there was anything unusual in the atmosphere of the junior playroom, Barbara slipped through the girls who were standing about, and reached her footstool and her letter almost before they noticed that she had returned. There seemed to be some wrangling going on between Jean Murray and Charlotte; but Jean Murray was always wrangling with some one about something, and Babs paid no more attention to it than to the sudden hush that followed as she dropped down in her old position on the floor. It was a good thing, she thought, that nobody talked just then, because there was so little time left in which to finish her letter. She took up the pages she had written and glanced over them.

‘Thank you awfuly much for your advice,’ she had scrawled in her large childish hand. ‘I am cheering up lots and now that I don’t take any notice of the girls and their awfull siliness it is quite nice being here but not nearly so nice as being at home with you and father all of which is now burried for ever alass in my past. I don’t hate girls like I did at first. At first they were always bothering and asking quesstions and being inquissitive but now they leave me alone and never talk except when they want the salt or the butter or haven’t heard the number of the psarm at prayers or can’t do their algibra I have lots of algibra to do because girls aren’t good at algibra I don’t think so I always do their algibra for them. Girls are no fun like boys but as long as they don’t say horible things to me like they did at first I think I shall be able to bear them all right but its rather dull excep when we play hockey I’m getting on at hockey Hurly-Burly says and she says I shall play in matches some day and she’s a brick and I like her. We haven’t had any gym yet because the gymnasiam is being painted but we’re going to begin to-morrow and I’m longing to begin they can’t laugh at my short skirts at gym because everybody’s skirt is short at gym and its red and very becomming Ruth says Ruth is Ruth Oliver and she’s a big girl and she hooks up my frocks and kisses me she kisses me rather a lot but it’s Ruth Oliver so I can put up with it. School is very nice when it’s games or algibra or latin but it’s horrid when its dictation or geography or coppies Finny says I must try so I am trying but I wish I wasn’t such an ignorrant girl I heard Jean Murray say yesterday I was the most ignorrant girl that ever came inside this house but praps that was because I had seventeen speling faults.’

She sighed as she dipped her pen in the ink again. That was all she had said, after writing nearly all the afternoon and evening. And she had so much more to say, and there was so little time left before prayers!

‘I have just seen the doctor who is a Beast and he isn’t a Beast,’ she had written laboriously on a fresh page, when Jean Murray stooped over her and shook her vigorously by the arm.

‘Oh, dear!’ sighed Babs, feeling in her pocket for the handkerchief that so rarely seemed to be in it. ‘There’s another blot, and I’m in such a hurry!’

‘It’s no use losing your temper about it,’ said Jean. ‘You’ve got to get up from the floor and fetch a desk, if you want to write letters.’

Barbara looked up in mild surprise. ‘But I’m not losing my temper! Are you sure you don’t mean you when you say me?’ she asked with a spice of mischief in her tone.

‘There!’ said Jean, turning triumphantly to the attendant Angela. ‘Didn’t I say she was only laughing at us? Now, look here,’ she continued, turning again to Babs, ‘you’ve got to remember that you’re the youngest in the school––’

‘Oh, don’t!’ interrupted Babs, putting up her hands to her ears. ‘You’ll begin about the head girl’s boots next.’

It was the most luckless thing she could have said, for it convinced Jean more than ever that the new girl was bent on making game of her most serious feelings.

‘I shall say anything I choose,’ she retorted hotly. ‘Get off the floor at once, will you? We don’t want ink spilt all over the place; this isn’t a nursery.’

‘Who’s spilling ink all over the place?’ asked Barbara, without moving. All the mischief that was in her rose uppermost when any one spoke to her like that.

‘You are, of course,’ returned Jean, shaking her again. ‘You’re so badly brought up that you don’t know how to behave in a civilised house. You’re nothing but a young savage; I heard Margaret Hulme say so, directly you arrived–there! It’s easy to see you’ve never had any one to look after you.’

The mischievous look died out of the child’s face, and she gathered up her papers and scrambled slowly to her feet. The boys would have known that such lamblike behaviour was only the prelude to one of the Babe’s ‘furies’; but Jean thought she had succeeded at last in subduing her, and she became exultant.

‘It’s time that some one civilised you,’ she remarked scornfully. ‘I’m glad I’ve been brought up properly, and not neglected like you.’

Barbara flashed round upon her suddenly. ‘What’s the matter with my bringing-up?’ she demanded in a breathless voice. ‘My father brought me up, and no one in the whole world could have brought me up better than he has.’

‘That accounts for it,’ scoffed Jean. ‘Fathers can’t bring anybody up, especially girls. I’ve heard mother say so, lots of times.’

Barbara’s eyes were glittering brightly. ‘My father can,’ she answered swiftly. ‘My father isn’t like other people’s fathers. You shouldn’t judge my father by your father. I don’t expect your father to be clever because mine is, do I?’

The implied insult was quite accidental on her part, in spite of the anger that was growing in her; but Jean could not be expected to know that.

‘How dare you say that my father isn’t clever?’ she cried indignantly. ‘My father is a professor at Edinburgh, so there!’

‘My father writes books,’ answered Babs, proudly. ‘It’s much more wonderful to write books than to be a professor, because everybody all over the world hears of you if you write books.’

‘That depends on whether they’re good books,’ argued Jean, warmly. ‘You have to be clever if you want to be a professor, but any stupid person can write a stupid book, and nobody ever hears of that kind of book at all.’

‘Everybody has heard of my father’s book, though, so that shows how little you know about it,’ replied Barbara. ‘The people in America liked his book so much that they asked him to go all the way to America to lecture about it. The people in America never asked your father––’

‘Is your father called Everard Berkeley?’ asked Jean, suddenly. She had not listened to grown-up conversations in the Christmas holidays for nothing, and she thought she saw her way at last to crushing the irrepressible new girl, once and for all.

Babs nodded. She was too proud to say anything. What other girl in the room had a father who was so celebrated that people knew him by his Christian name, instead of calling him just Mr. Somebody? She had only a short time in which to enjoy her triumph, however, for Jean Murray turned quickly on her heel, and walked off with a swaggering step.

‘Then my father says that your father is a failure over here,’ she answered, tossing her head contemptuously. ‘Nobody will read his old book in England; so he was obliged to go to America.’

The other girls were beginning to notice the dispute, and they came crowding round to hear what it was all about. Most of them were in time to see Jean Murray walk off with her head in the air, just as the little new girl clenched her fists and crouched down as if to make a spring. Then the storm broke, and the Babe’s fury was let loose among the fifty-five occupants of the junior playroom.

It was an easy matter, in that spring forward, to send some half dozen or so spinning out of her way, but Barbara did not stop to see what happened to them. All she wanted to do was to reach the arch offender of them all, the one who had dared to slight her father, and to hold him up to the ridicule of fifty-five girls.

Nobody quite knew what did happen on this unexampled occasion in the annals of Wootton Beeches; and certainly nobody stirred a finger to put a stop to it. All that the girls in the senior playroom could tell about it afterwards was that a sudden scuffle and several screams broke the hush and hum of voices on the other side of the curtain; and then Angela Wilkins dashed through the archway with a terrified look on her face, and seized Margaret by the arm.

‘Oh, come! do come!’ she sobbed out in her fright. ‘Barbara Berkeley has got Jean Murray down on the floor, and she’s killing her!’

CHAPTER X
THE END OF THE FEUD

‘You get up and behave yourself!’ she said in a stern undertone; and Jean Murray struggled to her feet and went off snivelling, to be comforted by the trembling and excited Angela. Then the elder girls melted away again into their own room, and a kind of uneasy hush settled down on the eighty-seven inhabitants of Wootton Beeches.

Barbara rubbed her eyes and stared wildly round her. A solid wall of girls stood between her and the scene of the recent scuffle; she could not see what had become of her victim, and at first she did not even realise what was producing this wonderful calm. Then the girls in front of her began slowly to move away towards the archway; and once she caught a glimpse through the curtain of the door in the room beyond. It was only a glimpse, for the girls closed up again immediately; but it was enough to show her the stately figure of Miss Finlayson, as she stood and wished her pupils good-night, one by one. Barbara had watched the same ceremony for a good many evenings now, but it had never seemed quite so orderly or so solemn before. To-night, it made a peculiar impression on the wild little tomboy who had been brought up without discipline or control, and the strangeness and the misery of her position overwhelmed her as with a new feeling. At the same instant, in striking contrast to the dismal reality, came the remembrance of the dream she had dreamed all her life about this very place called school; and, unnoticed by her school-fellows, who were fully occupied in trying to behave as if nothing had happened, she broke down and sobbed bitterly in her corner.

The stream of girls that had been filing past Miss Finlayson came to an end at last; but Miss Finlayson did not follow them immediately to the chapel. Far away, in a distant corner of the junior playroom, crouched a dishevelled little girl in a crumpled frock, weeping dolefully for a dream that had never come true; and Miss Finlayson stood and waited in her place by the door.

A sense of the extreme stillness, now that the footsteps of the girls had ceased, slowly impressed itself upon Barbara; and she looked up with a new feeling of alarm. There, through the opening in the curtain, she could see the stately figure of the head-mistress in the room beyond; and Babs thrust a round, inky ball of a handkerchief into her pocket, and hastened towards her in a panic.

‘I didn’t know you were waiting for me,’ she said, fighting to keep the quiver out of her voice. ‘I didn’t know they had all gone. I–I’d forgotten it was prayers now.’

She knocked over a chair as she stumbled across the room, and once her dress caught on the edge of a desk and stopped her; but Miss Finlayson waited with her hand out, and the little new girl reached her at last. Once more, behind the grave glance of the blue-grey eyes, lurked a suggestion of something softer and more human, and it gave Barbara a little courage.

‘I wasn’t crying because I was sorry I’d thumped Jean Murray,’ she burst out. ‘I’m not a bit sorry, not a bit! I’d like to thump her again for saying–for saying––’

It sounded uncommonly like telling tales, and she had to stop. Miss Finlayson still had hold of her hand, and still looked down at her with the mixture of expressions on her face.

‘Are you coming up to prayers, Babs?’ was all she said.

Barbara had not even heard the question. She was full of her grievance against Jean Murray, which she had almost forgotten for the minute; and she burst out again, more angrily than before.

‘Don’t you understand?’ she cried passionately. ‘I wasn’t crying for that; it–it was something else, but I can’t tell you what it was, because you’d only laugh. They all laugh–except when they’re just being horrible! Why didn’t you let me run away last week? I don’t want to stop with people like Jean Murray, and–and all the rest of them; I hate being here, I hate the girls, I hate you! Why won’t you let me go away?’

She hardly knew what she was saying. She had not been in such a passion since the dreary day, two years ago, when they took her nurse away from her, and she had made herself ill with fretting.

Miss Finlayson tightened her grasp on the hand that was struggling to free itself; then she bent over her rebellious little pupil, and laid her other hand against her burning cheek.

‘Are you coming up to prayers, Babs?’ she repeated. Her persistence began to take effect, and the cool touch of her fingers was very soothing.

‘Why–why won’t you let me go away?’ sobbed Babs, and the tears rained down her cheeks again.

‘Why?’ echoed Miss Finlayson, producing a handkerchief that had not been used, like Barbara’s, to mop up ink blots. ‘Because I want you myself, to be sure.’

She dried the child’s eyes as she spoke; and the small tear-stained face looked up at her wistfully. ‘Do you want me?’ asked Barbara. ‘Does anybody want me–truthfully?’

Miss Finlayson nodded, and a look slowly deepened in her face that gave the child confidence. ‘Yes, Babs, truthfully,’ she answered. Then she repeated for the last time, ‘Are you coming to prayers?’ And keeping the hot little hand within hers, she led her upstairs to the chapel.

At Wootton Beeches the girls always walked in and out of chapel in the order of their classes, beginning at the top of the school. But, this evening, the youngest child in the school walked out in front of everybody, for Miss Finlayson held her by the hand and would not let her go. They stood together, a curiously assorted couple, at the end of the passage that led to the other wing of the house; and one after another the girls passed them on their way to their rooms. There was not a sound for some moments, except the tapping of footsteps on the polished boards; then, walking last of all, came Jean Murray. Babs broke from her companion and flung herself impetuously forward.

‘I say, I’m awfully sorry I thumped you on the head just now,’ she began, and held out her hand invitingly to the enemy. ‘I wasn’t a bit sorry at first, and I wanted to do it again, frightfully; but I am sorry now, and I don’t.’

The girls who were still in the passage lingered, and looked back. Evidently, there was no end to the sensations that Barbara Berkeley meant to produce in her first term at school.

‘Hush!’ whispered Jean, glancing round timorously at the head-mistress.

Babs looked amazed. ‘Won’t you shake hands?’ she asked. ‘I know I thumped you awfully hard, but still––’

‘Sh-sh!’ repeated Jean, trying to push past her. ‘Don’t you know we’re not allowed––’

‘I think–I do think you might make it up,’ continued Babs, in a disappointed tone. ‘Even if I did hurt you rather, you must own you were very mean.’

Jean Murray, feeling the eyes of authority fixed upon her, made another attempt to escape. ‘Can’t you wait till to-morrow?’ she asked in an agitated whisper.

‘I should have waited, if it hadn’t been for that hymn,’ answered the child, still barring the way obstinately. ‘I can’t help it if the hymn made me feel funny without making you feel funny too, can I? I can’t think what there was about that hymn,’ she added to herself reflectively; ‘I never remember noticing a hymn so much before.’

Miss Finlayson came up to them, and Jean fairly quaked. If there was a rule that the head-mistress was strict about, it was the rule of silence after prayers. Jean knew, for she had been unlucky enough to break it more than once.

‘I have changed your room, Jean,’ said Miss Finlayson, calmly. ‘Angela will have yours for the rest of the term, and you are to sleep in number fourteen, next door to Ruth Oliver. I have just told Angela, so you can go straight to her old room now, and I will send up one of the servants to move your things for the night. The rest can be done in the morning. By the way,’ she added, as she left them, ‘you three may talk till the lights are put out; for it seems that Barbara has something to say that will not keep until to-morrow. Good-night.’

She walked away downstairs with a deliberate step; and the two children were left standing together on the landing.

‘Well, I never!’ exclaimed Jean, staring after Miss Finlayson.

But Babs was less concerned with the peculiarities of the head-mistress than with her own immediate business. ‘How much longer are you going to be before you shake hands?’ she asked.

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ answered Jean, awkwardly, and she at last put a limp hand into the one Barbara was tired of pressing upon her. They trotted along the passage side by side, Jean feeling a little overwhelmed by the suddenness of the reconciliation, while Babs wondered what had happened to make her so silent all at once. To her it seemed the most natural thing in the world to be on good terms with the enemy whose head you had just thumped, provided that you had apologised suitably afterwards; and she chatted away cheerfully until Jean was obliged to stifle her inclination to be dignified.

‘I say,’ said Babs, when they reached the gallery in the other wing of the house and were hurrying round it to their rooms; ‘shall I be punished a lot for knocking you down this evening?’

Jean recovered some of her self-assurance. If she was to be denied the pleasure, in future, of persecuting the new girl, there was no reason why she should not still patronise her.

‘Punished!’ she echoed. ‘That’s all you know about it. Nobody is ever punished here.’

It took Barbara a moment or two to get used to this new idea, and by that time they had reached their rooms. She returned to the subject soon after, however, when Ruth had opened the doors that led from her room into both theirs, so that they could talk across her if they liked.

‘Can you be as naughty as you choose in this school?’ demanded Babs, in a puzzled tone.

‘I don’t advise you to try,’ remarked Ruth.

‘Why not? What would happen if I did?’ asked Babs, curiously.

‘Well, you’d feel jolly small, and have to come round in the end and behave like other people,’ said Jean, raising her voice to make herself heard.

Barbara wandered into Ruth’s room to have her frock unfastened, and continued the discussion from there.

‘Then, is being good at school the same thing as behaving like other people?’ she said doubtfully.

The others seemed to have some difficulty in answering this. ‘There!’ said Ruth, giving her a little push; ‘make haste and get undressed.’

Barbara wandered back into her own room again, and thought it over carefully. ‘Being good at home wouldn’t be the same thing as behaving like other people,’ she observed presently.