Most eager of all was a child with a freckled face and reddish-coloured hair, who somehow seemed familiar to him, though he could not remember where he had met her before. She came right up to where he stood helplessly, with his right foot placed on the carriage-step; and she raised her voice shrilly above all the others.
‘May I see her before she gets worse?’ she implored sentimentally. ‘I should never forgive myself, Mary Wells says I shouldn’t, if anything happened to her, and––’
The Doctor made a great effort and waved them off distractedly, just as Margaret Hulme and some of the elder ones hurried on the scene and called angrily to his tormentors. He seized the opportunity to spring to his seat, and then turned and glared at them.
‘See her before she gets worse?’ he answered back furiously. ‘If you want to see her before you’ve done your best to finish her altogether, you’ll have to look sharp.’
Miss Finlayson suddenly appeared on the doorstep. Nobody knew how much she had seen or heard, but she was looking exceedingly stern. She opened her mouth to speak, just as Dr. Hurst perceived her and broke into a fresh torrent of words. By this time he had lost the last scrap of his patience.
‘What with rascally boys and hysterical schoolgirls,’ he shouted, seizing the whip and cracking it round his head, ‘how can you expect me to pull the case through?’
He tugged violently at the reins; the startled animal sprang forward, and the trap clattered noisily out of sight.
The few short, vigorous sentences with which Miss Finlayson improved the next five minutes sent the girls into the hockey field with a much reduced opinion of themselves. Margaret Hulme stayed behind to vindicate the offenders as well as she could; and the result was that the head-mistress remembered it was the last day of the term, and blamed herself for having almost allowed her feelings for the youngest girl in school to run away with her.
‘Send Jean and Angela up to my bedroom at once,’ she said thoughtfully, when Margaret had finished telling her what had been going on in the playroom that morning.
She waited for them on the landing, and kissed them both very affectionately when they appeared hand in hand. She glanced quickly from Angela’s red and swollen countenance to Jean’s pale and miserable one, and she decided not to say what had been in her mind the minute before. A much better idea struck her, and she acted upon it promptly.