‘Look here, Babs,’ she began, smoothing the mop of tangled hair with her hands; ‘you go on thinking that girls are like that, and you’ll get along all right!’ Barbara wriggled away from her before she had time to say any more, gave her a swift look and a smile of gratitude, and darted off in search of the boys. ‘They’ll be very stupid if they don’t see what a babe it is,’ added Jill to herself.
At the door of the conservatory, however, the small figure in the crumpled pinafore came to a sudden standstill.
‘I say, Jill,’ the child blurted out, and she clutched a handful of pinafore to give herself courage; ‘I–I want to tell you something.’
‘Do you?’ said Jill, smiling.
‘I want to explain that I hated you at first, because I thought you were going to make the boys like you better than me,’ Babs went on breathlessly. ‘And you frightened me too, because you laughed in such a funny way, just as if you were sneering at me for being in a muck. I thought, perhaps, it was because you were so grand, and your clothes were so grand, and all that; but I couldn’t help being in a muck, because I always am in a muck, you see; and so, you see–you see––’
‘Look here Babs,’ she began, smoothing the mop of tangled hair
‘I see,’ said Jill, quietly; and she looked quite thoughtful for a minute or two. Babs came a step nearer.
‘I don’t hate you now,’ she said frankly. ‘For one thing, the boys don’t like you better than me, after all. They don’t even like you so much as they thought they were going to. But I think you’re awfully nice,–almost as nice as Kit and Nurse and father,–and I shall go and tell them so, now; and then, perhaps, they won’t say you are young-ladyish any more!’