‘Home isn’t school,’ answered Ruth. ‘And Finny’s school isn’t like other people’s schools,’ she added.

‘Isn’t it?’ said Babs, with interest. ‘Where’s the difference?’

‘Ask Jean,’ replied Ruth; and Jean took up the tale from beyond.

‘I was at another school before I came here, and it was very different, I can tell you,’ she remarked. ‘There were nothing but rules there, and you always seemed to be breaking one or another of them, without knowing it; and then you got punished. I was punished the whole time I was there.’

‘What sort of punishments?’ asked Barbara.

‘Stupid punishments,’ answered Jean, vaguely. ‘Punishments that made you feel foolish, and made you hate people. I did hate a lot of people at that school. I thought I was awfully wicked because I hated so many people. And then I came here,’ she wound up triumphantly.

‘And did you find you were good when you came here?’ asked Babs.

‘You shut up and get yourself ready for bed, or else Fräulein will catch you,’ was all Jean said in reply to this.

Barbara gave one or two perfunctory taps to her head with a brush. ‘I suppose that’s why we’re left so much to ourselves,’ she remarked, after a pause. ‘We never see the teachers except at meals or in lesson time, do we?’

‘Of course we don’t,’ replied Ruth; ‘that’s where Finny’s school is so different, you see. In most schools you are being watched all day by some one or another, and it makes you whisper because you don’t want to be overheard. Nothing makes Finny so furious as to catch any one whispering.’

‘Is she ever furious?’ inquired Barbara.

‘Don’t be a young silly,’ said Ruth, good-naturedly, a reply which had no effect whatever upon Barbara.

‘It seems to me,’ she went on thoughtfully, ‘that it’s very difficult to know what is wrong and what isn’t, when there aren’t any punishments and no one is there to tell you.’

‘Well, you’re supposed to have some sense, you know,’ explained Ruth. ‘Finny’s great idea is that you should think for yourself and not go to other people to find out things. She says being good isn’t worth much, if you’re only good because some one else tells you to be good.’

‘That’s all very well,’ objected Babs, ‘but suppose you don’t know without being told?’

‘Well, if you don’t know that behaving like a wild Indian is wrong, it’s not much good being there to tell you so,’ said Jean, bluntly.

The point of her remark was quite lost on Barbara, who was still puzzling over a question that had never occurred to her before. ‘At home,’ she observed, ‘we never talk about whether a thing is right or wrong. If we did, the boys would call it awfully slack.’

‘What do they call it when you nearly kill people by knocking them down and hitting them?’ asked Jean, rather suddenly. The application of hot water was causing the bruise on her forehead to smart most unpleasantly.

‘Oh!’ said Barbara, in a surprised tone; ‘I thought you had made it up?’

‘Bother making it up,’ grumbled Jean, ‘when you’ve got a lump as big as––’

‘Why didn’t you say so before?’ cried Babs, in great concern. ‘Haven’t you any pomade to put on it?’

Something very like an amused chuckle came from the direction of Ruth Oliver, but Babs was in far too great a hurry to notice that. Flinging everything right and left on the floor, she cleared out two drawers and a box before she succeeded in finding the bottle she wanted.

‘Here it is!’ she exclaimed, taking it in to her wounded foe. ‘It’s awfully good stuff, really; and it keeps you from turning blue and yellow. We always use it at home.’

Ruth’s chuckle grew into a hearty laugh. ‘I should think you wanted pounds of it in your home, if they’re all like you!’ she exclaimed.

Barbara wondered what the joke was. ‘They’re not like me,’ she said simply. ‘The others are all boys, you see, so they get their own way without fighting.’

And when the German governess came to turn out their lights, she found the three white-robed figures standing together in Jean’s room, one of them shaking with laughter, another trying rather unsuccessfully to keep grave, while the third, holding out a bottle in her hand, looked at them both with a puzzled air. There was no end, thought Fräulein, to the caprices of English children. Had not Miss Finlayson been relating to all the teachers downstairs, how the two little ones before her had flown at each other in a passion, just before prayers?

The junior playroom felt equally incapable of grappling with the situation, when the new girl marched gaily into it the next morning with her arm linked in Jean Murray’s. For once, Jean’s followers found themselves at a loss. Not having been informed what actually had taken place in the passage the night before, they could hardly be expected to know all at once how to treat this new state of affairs. Nor did Jean trouble herself to enlighten them. Indeed, she was so cross when any one approached her on the subject, that even Angela had to leave her alone; while the junior playroom in general, being less devoted, threw out dark hints about temper as soon as Jean was out of hearing. Angela, however, had the wit to see the one thing that was evident–the feud with the new girl was at an end, and anybody who wanted to keep friends with Jean Murray in future would have to accept Barbara Berkeley as well. So she decided to accept Barbara herself, to begin with; and she set to work at the same time to convert the whole of the junior playroom.

‘If you don’t behave decently to her, you’ll have Finny down on you,’ she advised, in the few moments allowed for conversation after breakfast. ‘Anybody could see that, from the way Finny glared at Jean last night.’

‘Did you see it?’ inquired Charlotte Bigley, with unpleasant directness.

‘N–no, not exactly,’ admitted Angela, uncomfortably. ‘But Mary Wells did, and she told me. And look here,’ she went on, shifting her ground hurriedly, ‘Jean’s made it up with Barbara Berkeley, and the sooner we do the same the better it’ll be for us. Besides, why shouldn’t we make it up? It’s such a bore to have to keep on remembering all the time that you’re furious with some one!’

This was more to the point; and the junior playroom, which had never thrown itself with any heartiness into the feud, decided that Barbara Berkeley was to be accepted without any more delay. Unfortunately, Barbara Berkeley, who had never realised that her school-fellows had been leaving her in peace on purpose to annoy her, was quite unprepared for the sudden change in their behaviour.

Charlotte Bigley was the first to put into force the resolution that had been arrived at by the junior playroom. ‘If you like,’ she observed carelessly, when she met Barbara by the bookshelf, just before the first class, ‘you can put away Ruth Oliver’s desk after preparation, instead of me.’

For her part, she had always felt kindly disposed towards the new girl, and the offer she was making now came straight from her heart, and was the most generous one she could think of at the moment. But Babs only looked dismayed.

‘Why must I put away Ruth Oliver’s desk?’ she demanded. ‘I have to put away Margaret Hulme’s as it is; and it’s so difficult to get dressed in time for supper when there’s such a lot of desks to put away first. Of course,’ she added with an effort, ‘I’ll do it to please you, if you really want me to.’

‘Why, I thought you’d like to do it!’ exclaimed Charlotte, staring at her. ‘You’re so thick with Ruth, and naturally I supposed––’

‘Thanks awfully,’ said Barbara, without enthusiasm. ‘It’s really awfully kind of you, but I think p’raps you’d better go on doing it, if you’re used to doing it. Of course, I know some people like doing those stupid things for the big girls, but––’

‘All right,’ said Charlotte, abruptly; and she went away, feeling distinctly small.

Babs hurried off to the Fifth classroom, and arrived just in time for the geography lesson. She was settling herself as usual at the bottom desk, when her neighbour, rather a dull girl, for whom she secretly felt a sort of contempt because she took no interest in her lessons, but only learned them from conscientious motives, began making advances to her.

‘Barbara,’ she whispered, nudging the new girl in a familiar way that was meant to be sociable. Babs, having sat next to her for fourteen days without extracting a single remark from her, was considerably startled.

‘What do you want?’ she asked impatiently. She was taking a last frantic look at the capes of Scotland, and the interruption was agonising.

‘Would you like to be my partner, next time we practise running with Hurly-Burly?’ proceeded Mary Wells, with an air of extreme benevolence. She was rather glad that Jean Murray had made it up with the new girl, for it had not been amusing to sit perpetually next to some one with whom she was not allowed to associate.

‘Why, no, of course not!’ answered Barbara, giving up the capes of Scotland in despair, and turning rather crossly to the tiresome neighbour who had never bothered her before. ‘We’re not a bit evenly matched, and it wouldn’t be fair. Ask Angela Wilkins, if you want a partner; she doesn’t run much faster than you do.’

If there had been time, her amazed neighbour would no doubt have told her what she thought of her. It was bad enough to have her friendly suggestion thrown back in her face, but to be offered a gratuitous criticism of her running powers into the bargain was intolerable. However, Miss Tomlinson said ‘Silence!’ before Mary could express her feelings, so Babs remained in comfortable ignorance of them.

She was not to be left alone for long, however, and it soon became impossible even for Barbara not to see that a change of some sort had come over her school-fellows. During the two weeks she had been at school, meal-times had been delicious periods of peace, when every one had babbled round her but never to her, and nobody had interrupted her if she wanted to dream. But to-day, when they all met in the dining-room for lunch, in the ten minutes’ ‘break’ that occurred in the middle of the morning, it was evident that her time for dreaming was gone by. This was the opportunity that the children of the junior playroom had been eagerly awaiting since the moment when Angela had succeeded in moving them to charitable designs. So Babs had scarcely made her appearance in the dining-room, than a crowd of eager penitents descended upon her, jostling one another in the attempt to be first. One rushed at her with the biscuits, another with a glass of milk, and a third with a plateful of bread and jam.

‘I say, don’t bother! Thanks awfully, don’t you know,’ stammered Barbara, who was a little flustered at finding herself the object of so much attention. She helped herself to bread and jam, accepted the milk, which the bearer insisted on holding for her till she felt inclined to drink it, and then tried to slip away as usual to a retired corner. But her way was barred by another group of girls, headed by the zealous Angela herself.

‘I wonder if you’ll help me with my algebra in French class,’ began the latter, beaming upon her former enemy with the air of one who was conferring a favour. ‘I always get in such a bog over it.’

‘You’re so splendid at algebra, Babs, aren’t you?’ added another, with great warmth.

‘She’s good at lots of things! She’ll get to the top of the Fifth in no time, won’t she?’ cried Angela, with her ordinary disregard for facts.

‘Oh, no,’ said Barbara, earnestly. ‘There’s my spelling; you’re forgetting that.’

‘Ye–es,’ allowed Angela, unwillingly; ‘but spelling isn’t everything.’

‘Should think not, indeed!’ echoed the chorus of enthusiasts.

‘And I don’t know any arithmetic,’ proceeded Barbara, desperately. It really hurt her regard for truth to have all these absurd remarks made about her.

‘What’s arithmetic?’ demanded Angela, loudly.

‘Only think of the piles of history you know!’ chimed in some one else.

‘Yes, indeed!’ said the chorus.

‘And Latin!’ proclaimed another admirer.

‘I–I wish you wouldn’t,’ murmured Babs, unhappily.

She could not think what had come over them all; and they made her feel foolish. Fortunately, somebody noticed just then that she had finished the bread and jam; and they all rushed off, jostling one another again as they went, to find fresh provisions. Barbara seized the opportunity to escape, dodged the placid bearer of the milk, and went in search of Jean Murray. She had an uncommonly shrewd suspicion that Jean Murray was somehow at the bottom of this new and irritating persecution.

She found her hidden away in a corner of the big dining-room, occupying very much the position that Barbara herself had enjoyed until now. Her appearance was dejected, and she looked as though the encouragement of noble sentiments did not agree with her nearly so well as the strife and wrangling in which she usually indulged. The truth was that her new pose of friendliness was making her feel unpleasantly self-conscious; and she was afraid of being laughed at by the big girls for having so meekly accepted her late enemy for a friend. The big girls, of course, worried themselves so little about the petty quarrels of the junior playroom, that they had no more intention of laughing at her than Barbara had; but it was impossible for so important a person as Jean Murray to realise that. So she gave a guilty start when Barbara, heated, aggrieved, and bubbling over with resentment, suddenly pounced upon her in her corner.

‘I say, look here,’ began Babs, impetuously; ‘I thought you’d made it up, and it’s a shame!’

‘What are you talking about?’ demanded Jean Murray. ‘I have made it up, long ago.’

‘Then whose fault is it that all those girls keep bothering me?’ exclaimed Barbara, growing more indignant as she went on. ‘I haven’t had a moment’s peace all the morning, and it makes me feel silly. I don’t like being made to feel silly. Why don’t you tell them to leave me alone?’

‘But I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Jean. ‘How are they making you feel silly?’

‘They keep on telling me how clever I am,’ grumbled Barbara, in a tone of the deepest contempt. ‘Me clever! Just think of it! And they say I’m going to get to the top of the class, and all that rot. What do they mean by it? That’s what I want to know. I was just beginning to get used to girls, and I told Kit only yesterday that they were not so bad after all, because they left you pretty much to yourself; and now–look at them! It’s enough to make any one feel silly. Well, what’s the joke?’

Jean was laughing heartily. It was the first time that morning she had been able to forget her own feelings of ‘silliness’; and it cheered her considerably to find that some one else was in the same plight as herself. ‘You are queer!’ she declared. ‘Why, they are doing all that to show that they want to be nice to you, of course.’

Barbara stared at her aghast. ‘Oh!’ was all she said at first. After a pause for reflection, she added suddenly, ‘Then what were they trying to be all the time they left me alone?’

Jean stopped laughing, and began kicking at the window-seat by which they stood.

‘Was that their way of being nasty?’ proceeded Babs, in a puzzled tone.

‘I–I suppose so,’ muttered Jean, looking away from her.

‘Oh!’ said Barbara again.

There was another pause, and then Jean made an immense effort. ‘I made them leave you alone,’ she jerked out. ‘I hated you. It–it was because of Margaret Hulme.’

Barbara’s puzzled look vanished. When she did begin to understand a thing, she was generally pretty quick about it. ‘I’m beastly sorry,’ she said softly. ‘A little while ago, I thought Jill was going to make the boys like her better than me; and I felt just like that. What a pity you didn’t tell me sooner!’

That, after all, was their real reconciliation; and this time there was no doubt about it. If there had been, it would have been ended finally by Margaret Hulme herself, that same afternoon, in the cloakroom. The head girl had been taking off her own muddy boots for more than a fortnight now; and that in itself was enough to quicken her observation of events in the junior playroom.

‘Isn’t there anybody over there who would like to unlace my boots for me?’ she said in a loud voice, as the younger ones came trooping into the cloakroom after the hockey practice.

There was silence in the ranks of the juniors. The big girls were smiling, the little ones looked at one another doubtfully, and the head girl waited with her foot put forward. The etiquette of the junior playroom was tremendous, and although forty-five sets of fingers were itching to be at the knot in the head girl’s bootlace, nobody could move until Jean Murray did.

‘You can do it, if you like,’ she said to Barbara indifferently.

‘Oh, no,’ said Barbara, quickly. ‘I shouldn’t think of it.’ This time, her sacrifice was genuine, for Margaret had kissed her just before dinner and told her she was a ‘good little soul,’ and the feeling of the youngest girl in the school had considerably changed in consequence with regard to the head girl’s boots.

‘Of course,’ said Margaret Hulme, drawing back her foot, ‘if nobody wants––’

A murmur ran along the ranks of the juniors, and Babs suddenly whispered something in Jean’s ear. Then the two children joined hands and presented themselves solemnly before the head girl.

‘Please,’ said Barbara, quickly, ‘we’ve settled it.’

‘It’s about time,’ observed Margaret.

‘We’re going to halve it,’ added Jean, in a great hurry.

‘What? My foot?’ asked the head girl.

The wit of the head girl produced a storm of laughter in the cloakroom. When it subsided, Barbara was ready with her explanation.

‘Jean’s going to do them four days, and I’m going to do them the other three,’ she said. ‘And Jean’s going to begin,’ she added, and walked away heroically.

‘Oh, no, you begin,’ said Jean, feebly.

But Margaret smiled and pinched her ear. ‘You begin, child,’ she said; and Jean fairly loved the new girl from that moment onwards.

CHAPTER XI
MISS FINLAYSON’S UNCLE, THE CANON

It was plain-work evening, some five weeks or so before the end of the term; and fifty-five busy little people, on one side of the curtain, sewed laboriously at fifty-five flannel garments, while thirty-two others, in the seniors’ room, were cutting out fresh ones and struggling with what Miss Smythe called the ‘fixing.’ Usually, plain-work evening was the dullest out of the seven, for conversation did not flourish under the depressing dominion of flannel, and Miss Smythe, the needlework mistress who came from the town twice a week to teach them, had never managed to interest her pupils either in herself or in what they were doing. But to-night there was something to discuss that thrilled every one of the workers on both sides of the curtain, and the effect on the flannel garments of this unusual enthusiasm even awoke a faint wonderment in the mind of Miss Smythe. She did not know, never having tried to win the confidence of the children, that the cause of the emotion that was pulsing from end to end of the two playrooms was the temporary residence, under the honoured roof of Wootton Beeches, of Miss Finlayson’s uncle, the Canon.

The Canon had always been an object of interest, theoretically, to the girls at Wootton Beeches. They did not know much about him, except that he lived in some cathedral town in the North of England, and came South about once a year and spent part of his holiday at Wootton Beeches; and they were familiar with his portrait, which always stood on the writing-table in his niece’s study. That was all they could have told anybody; but the very lack of facts only added to the magic of his name, and as none of them happened to be in touch with a bishop, or even with a dean, Miss Finlayson’s uncle the Canon continued to impress them from a distance with his importance. Hitherto, his visit had always happened to fall in the holidays; but, this time, he had unaccountably appeared in the middle of the term, and the excitement of his actual presence among them had given them enough news to put in their letters home for quite two weeks. The day before, he had even replaced the curate in the little chapel, and had not only read prayers but had delivered an address on unselfishness as well; and it was this address that had provided the whole school, on plain-work evening, with a burning topic of conversation.

The problem that had just been put into words by Charlotte Bigley was one that had exercised the ingenuity of everybody since yesterday morning. To do good works was the present ardent desire of all their hearts; but where were the good works to be found?

‘I suppose there’s always something to be done for somebody, only we’ve got to discover what it is,’ said Mary Wells, after profound reflection.

‘He did say life was full of little things that were waiting to be done, but it’s so easy to talk like that,’ complained Jean Murray. ‘Why didn’t he say what things?’

‘Well, you see, we’ve got to discover what they are,’ persisted Mary. When she did manage to produce an idea, she was always very slow to part with it.

‘You said that before,’ retorted Jean, impolitely; ‘and it doesn’t help anybody at all. You can’t go round asking people, can you? They’d call you a nuisance.’

Barbara sighed, and laid down the blackened piece of flannel she had been toiling at since the beginning of term. Between the address of the Canon and the shapelessness of her flannel petticoat, life was very difficult to understand just then.

‘Besides,’ she chimed in, when Jean finished speaking, ‘if everybody is doing something for everybody else, there’s nobody left to do anything for!’

‘Finny always says we are to do things for ourselves as much as we can, and that the way to help other people most is to see that they don’t have to bother about us. That’s not a bit the same thing as going round and finding out what people want done for them,’ continued Charlotte, eloquently.

‘They can’t both be right,’ declared Angela, shrilly. ‘If the Canon says one thing and Finny says another, what are we to believe, and what is the truth of it all, I should like to know? The truth–that’s what I want!’

‘Yes, you do,’ remarked Babs, beginning to chuckle. ‘You want it awfully badly, most of the time.’

‘You mind your own business, Barbara Berkeley, and I’ll mind mine,’ advised Angela, threateningly.

‘But that’s just what we haven’t got to do,’ retorted Babs, with another laugh. ‘I’ve got to forget my own business and look after somebody else’s, and so have you. The Canon said so.’

‘The Canon never said anybody was to have enough cheek for two people, anyhow,’ returned Angela, rather feebly. She generally ended in coming off the worse in a battle of words with Barbara. On this occasion, however, she had the junior playroom with her.

‘You shouldn’t joke about serious things, Barbara Berkeley,’ said Mary Wells, disapprovingly.

‘Barbara Berkeley thinks she can laugh at everything!’ cried Angela, with renewed courage.

Miss Smythe came up at the same moment and put the crowning touch on Barbara’s discomfiture by examining the luckless flannel petticoat and disclosing the fact that she had sewed it up all the way round.

‘How do you expect a child is going to get into that?’ asked the needlework mistress, holding up the misshapen garment to the derision of the whole room.

Barbara accepted the criticism and the laughter with equal unconcern. She had never supposed that any child was going to get into a petticoat that only existed for her express torture and the witticisms of Miss Smythe. It had been unpicked so often that it would scarcely hold the large, uneven stitches she repeatedly put into it; and she took up the scissors and began to undo it all over again as a necessary part of the evening’s proceedings. Hardly, however, had she snipped at the first piece of cotton, than she was assailed on both sides by eager helpers, thirsting for the painful pleasures of self-sacrifice.

‘Let me do it for you, Babe!’ exclaimed Angela, quite forgetting their recent dispute on the very subject of the virtue she now was so anxious to exploit.

‘No, let me,’ begged Mary Wells on the other side.

Barbara looked from one to the other doubtfully. The Canon had said nothing about complications of this kind. Then Mary took the decision and the flannel petticoat simultaneously out of her hands.

‘Do, there’s a dear,’ she said coaxingly. ‘Think how I helped you with your German the day before yesterday.’

‘It’s a shame,’ vowed Angela Wilkins, retiring sulkily. ‘I did ask first!’

‘Never mind,’ said Babs, soothingly; ‘I’m sure to do it again before long; I always do.’

Angela, however, found a more abiding consolation in Barbara’s temporary idleness.

‘You’re not doing anything for anybody, that’s certain!’ she threw back at her jeeringly. ‘Why, you’re the only idle person in the room! Call that being unselfish, indeed!’

Barbara hastened to clear herself of the reproach by picking up Mary Wells’s neatly made and spotless piece of white flannel. She was not sure what it was meant for, as it was not sewed together anywhere; and she had never been shown how to do the elaborate scallops that ornamented the edge of it. But a trifle like want of skill made very little difference to a seeker after self-sacrifice; and Babs recklessly plunged her needle into the beginning of the next scallop, and entangled the silk hopelessly. A cry from Mary Wells disturbed her well-meant efforts. The Canon, thought Mary, might say what he liked about people doing things for others, but was it quite fair when they did them all wrong?

‘It’s for my sister’s baby,’ she lamented, seizing her handiwork from the zealous Barbara; ‘and if I don’t finish it soon, the baby will be too big for head-flannels at all.’

‘But–I wanted to do something for you,’ protested Babs, in a disappointed tone.

‘You’ve stickied the needle, and left a great black finger-mark on it,’ wailed Mary Wells, making fresh discoveries, as she went on, of what Babs had done for her.

Miss Smythe came up to know what the fuss was about; and she promptly added her word to the condemnation of Barbara Berkeley.

‘What do you mean by touching anybody else’s work, you naughty little girl?’ she said sharply. ‘You are more trouble than anybody else in the school, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

Barbara did not look at all ashamed of herself. She never did when people were cross with her. Mary Wells had the grace to come to her assistance.

‘Please, Miss Smythe,’ she said, swallowing her mortification at the ravages in the head-flannel, ‘it was my fault as well. I took Barbara’s work, to begin with.’

The needlework mistress stared from one to the other. ‘What’s come over the children?’ she exclaimed. ‘Why are you interfering with each other’s work like this?’

Barbara assumed an exaggerated expression of meekness. ‘Please, it was because we were both trying to sacrifice ourselves,’ she announced.

It certainly sounded a ridiculous reason when it was put that way, but it completed the perplexity of Miss Smythe, and that was something.

‘It seems to me,’ she said severely, ‘that you are strangely forgetting yourself, Barbara Berkeley. Commence what I gave you to do at once, and stand up until I tell you to sit down again.’

‘Why, the Canon said we were to forget ourselves,’ began Babs, mischievously; and there is no doubt that a further penalty would have been added to her punishment had not Jean Murray made a sudden diversion by dropping her thimble. In spite of the want of success that had attended Barbara’s attempt at good works, the influence of the Canon was still very strong among the occupants of the junior playroom; and five girls hastily flung aside their work, and bumped their heads together on the floor in their hurry to restore Jean her property. Jean took it with the grudging manner of one who would like to have been in the fortunate position of conferring rather than of accepting a service; and Miss Smythe in despair condemned five more culprits to a standing position.

As luck would have it, the Canon expressed a wish that evening to see what the young people were doing with themselves; and it happened that Miss Finlayson brought him through the curtain into the junior playroom just after the six ringleaders had been ordered to stand up.

‘Very nice, very charming, to be sure!’ murmured the old gentleman, whose benevolent face had gone a long way in carrying his address home to the hearts of his hearers. ‘Such a beautiful and womanly sight, too! I suppose you are all working for the poor, eh, my dears? Very excellent indeed, I’m sure!’

His niece was busy talking with Miss Smythe, and did not correct his mistake; and the children were too shy to do more than look at one another and giggle faintly. The Canon went on, and bent over Mary Wells, who appealed to him at once by the serious expression of her face and her diligent application to the head-flannel.

‘And for whom are you working so industriously, may I ask?’ he inquired benignly.

‘It’s for my sister–I mean the baby,’ stammered Mary, much flustered at being thus singled out. The Canon felt a little perplexed, not having supposed Mary Wells or her sister to belong to what he largely called ‘the poor’; and he passed on hurriedly to where the six culprits stood first on one leg and then on the other, trying to stitch at their work with wavering and unsteadied fingers.

‘Dear me!’ he said, slightly taken aback. ‘Is it–is it quite usual–I mean, do you find it convenient to perform your–your embroidery in that exceedingly arduous position?’

The six girls edged up to one another; and more giggles, very nervous ones this time, greeted the Canon’s remark. He put on his eye-glasses, and began slowly to grasp the meaning of their uncomfortable position.

‘Ah!’ he said, with a knowing smile. ‘So you have done something you shouldn’t, eh, my dears? Shocking, shocking! Let us see what the cause of offence is, and perhaps we can get the punishment mitigated for you. How would that be, eh?’

He turned to look for Miss Smythe, and the six put their heads together for a hasty, whispered consultation.

‘Let’s tell him it’s through his sermon,’ urged Barbara, all agog with mischief. ‘It would be such fun!’

‘Certainly not!’ decided Angela, solemnly. ‘He must never know. Didn’t he say it was splendid to suffer for righteousness’s sake, and isn’t this real righteousness?’

She carried the remaining four with her; and by the time Finny and Miss Smythe joined the Canon in front of them, five out of the six faces glowed with the fervour of martyrdom. The sixth was glowing too, but hardly from such a lofty motive.

‘Well,’ said Miss Finlayson, gently, ‘and what is the reason of this?’

Miss Smythe coughed and hesitated. She did not understand her pupils in the least, but she had a certain feeling of loyalty towards them, and she did not want to get them into trouble. Added to this, she really did not know the reason of it.

‘They–they were a little tiresome, and I made them stand up,’ she explained hurriedly. ‘No doubt–only high spirits, and–and so on. I–I could not quite grasp what had been upsetting them this evening, and I always find standing up is–is an excellent remedy for–for high spirits, in short.’

It was the opinion of the junior playroom afterwards that ‘Smithy’ had got out of it very well; and she went up in its estimation henceforth. But her explanation failed to satisfy Miss Finlayson. There was something about the virtuousness on the offenders’ faces that struck her as being overdone; and she turned to the one at the end of the row, whose countenance was a study in suppressed emotions, and tried to get at the truth of the matter.

‘What was it, Barbara?’ she asked in that tone of hers that would make any girl tell her anything. Not that Barbara, on this occasion, needed forcing.

‘It was because of the sermon yesterday,’ she said, bubbling over with enjoyment of the situation. ‘And we were all trying to sacrifice ourselves, and it was so difficult, because nobody wanted anything done; and then Mary Wells sacrificed herself for me, so I tried to do the same for her, and I only spoiled the baby’s head-flannel, and made Smithy–I mean Miss Smythe–wild. That was why I stood up. The other five stood up because they all tried to sacrifice themselves for Jean’s thimble; and Miss Smythe hadn’t heard the sermon, you see, and she only thought they were being naughty, so––’

‘That will do,’ said Miss Finlayson, and she turned her back hurriedly on the row of martyrs. The needlework mistress was almost in tears at what she considered a wilfully frivolous manner of referring to a sermon by a real canon. But the Canon just passed his hand across his mouth, and then gave up the attempt to look shocked.

‘You are very good little girls to listen so attentively to people’s sermons,’ he said, smiling openly. ‘And I think, if anybody ought to stand up, it should be by rights a certain old gentleman who preaches them. What do you say, Miss Smythe? If I promise to stand up for the rest of the evening, will you let these six young ladies sit down?’

CHAPTER XII
THE FURTHER PURSUIT OF GOOD WORKS

Jean drew herself up complacently. ‘Well, of course he meant much bigger things than just picking up people’s thimbles and interfering with everybody all round,’ she began rather contemptuously.

‘He said little things, all the same,’ observed Mary Wells, doggedly.

‘That,’ said Jean, airily, ‘was only his way of putting it–and because he was a canon,’ she added, struck by a brilliant thought. ‘When you are a canon, the things you consider little are the same as the things that ordinary people call big.’

‘Bravo, Jean,’ said Charlotte Bigley, sarcastically. ‘Now, let us hear what the big things are.’

Jean was on her mettle, and she gave herself a moment’s desperate reflection.

‘Well, things like helping the poor, and taking food to people who are starving, and giving up your pocket-money to buy things for them, and not minding how dirty they are, nor how wicked and dishonest and–and tipsy,’ she proclaimed.

The junior playroom was much impressed by this new view of the Canon’s sermon.

‘Isn’t Jean clever?’ demanded Angela, proudly, of her immediate neighbours. One of these happened to be Barbara, who fully agreed with her, but still appeared a little puzzled.

‘It will be very difficult to do all that,’ she observed. ‘How can we do things for the poor, when we never see any poor?’

‘You never know when the chance may come,’ answered Jean, who was rarely at a loss. ‘Besides, there’s the holidays.’

‘What!’ said Mary, in a voice of dismay. ‘Have we got to wait till the holidays before we can be unselfish?’

‘Well,’ replied Jean, vaguely, ‘you can’t say that, for an opportunity may occur at any minute. What we’ve got to do is to be on the look-out for it.’

This unsatisfactory way of disposing of the Canon’s address fell very flat after the recent excitement in the juniors’ room concerning it; and most of Jean’s listeners grumbled loudly as soon as she was out of hearing. But Babs and Angela unhesitatingly threw in their lot with Jean. They were not quite sure what she meant, but they never doubted her right to be their leader in this as in everything.

‘We’ll all keep on the look-out,’ they said to one another; ‘and the first who sees an opportunity of helping the poor must promise to share it with the other two.’

Saturday afternoon came round in another day or two, and on Saturday afternoon the girls could do pretty much as they liked, as soon as the hockey practice was over. It was one of those late wintry days in March which bring with them a promise of spring to come: there was a sharpness in the air, now that the sun was nearing the west, that proclaimed it still to be winter, while a faint earthiness of smell, a tumult of birds’ voices in the hedge, and an intense blueness above, all told of the warmer season in store. The triumvirate, as Margaret Hulme had nicknamed Jean and her two inseparable companions, were much too fond of the open air to go indoors before they were obliged; so, while most of their school-fellows voted for the fire and a story-book, they wandered off down the nine-acre field, their arms linked affectionately together. Their conversation was very engrossing, for it turned on the gymnastic competition that was going to be held at the end of the term, for which the Canon had just offered a prize of six morocco-bound books, to be chosen by the successful competitor herself.

‘That’s where this hole is such a nice hole for a school,’ said Jean. ‘At the other school I went to, they never asked you what books you’d like; and they always gave you poetry.’

‘Some poetry is all right. I think I like poetry when it’s got a story in it, and the rhymes are not too far away from one another, and the lines jog along without your having to bother about them,’ remarked Babs.

‘Oh, that kind isn’t bad,’ admitted Jean. ‘I didn’t mean Macaulay and Longfellow and all the real poets. But the stuff they gave you at my school was horribly dull, and it never had any sort of story in it, and the lines didn’t seem to belong to one another at all; and there was generally a thing called a glossary at the end, which only showed that it wasn’t fit for any one to read.’

‘I know that kind of poetry; we have lots of it at home,’ put in Angela. ‘There’s a chap called Browning who’s rather like that. Have you ever read any Browning, you two?’

‘No,’ said Jean, flatly. ‘Don’t believe you have either. My father says Browning didn’t understand himself, and I’m sure you don’t know more than Browning. So there!’

‘Never mind about the poetry,’ interposed Barbara. ‘I want to hear about the gym prize. Who do you think is going to get it, Jean?’

‘Well, Margaret is awfully good, of course, but we shall know better after the trial on Monday afternoon,’ said Jean, cautiously.

‘What trial?’ asked Barbara.

‘Why,’ exclaimed Jean, in surprise, ‘didn’t you hear Finny give out that we were all to do the show exercises before her on Monday afternoon, so that she could decide who was to go in for the prize?’

‘Of course she didn’t hear; the Babe’s always asleep!’ said Angela, with scorn. ‘I watched her all the time Finny was speaking, and she was smiling away to herself as if some one was having a conversation with her.’

‘Never mind, she’s getting better,’ said Jean, approvingly. ‘She doesn’t gape half so much as she did, and she doesn’t jump when you go up and speak to her suddenly. By the way, you’ve got as good a chance as any one, Babe, of getting the gym prize.’

Barbara, who had taken their frank criticisms of her without a murmur, could not allow this last assertion to pass. She pulled up suddenly in the middle of the field, and looked first at one and then at the other of her two companions. ‘What do you mean?’ she gasped.