‘I’m going to be in your class for everything except Latin and mathematics,’ shouted Barbara, flying into the juniors’ room just before dinner. It seemed to her of the first importance that everybody should know which class she was to be in, and she was distinctly surprised when Jean Murray, whom she had addressed, turned her back on her and began talking loudly to some one else. ‘Don’t you hear?’ persisted Babs, coming round in front of her again. ‘I’m going to be in your class for everything except––’
‘Sneak!’ burst out Jean Murray, unable to control herself any longer. ‘Tell-tale! You oughtn’t to be in anybody’s class, you oughtn’t!’
Barbara stood stockstill, and looked at her. All the courage she had regained from her peaceful morning in Miss Finlayson’s study dwindled away again, and left her hopeless of propitiating these strange schoolgirls, who seemed determined on being cross with her whatever she did. Angela knocked roughly against her at the same instant, and surprised her at last into a remonstrance.
‘What have I done?’ she demanded. ‘Won’t anybody tell me what I have done?’
No one answered her. The alliance of Jean and Angela, though Jean was the youngest and Angela the most empty-headed of all the children there, meant the existence of a strong party in the junior playroom; and the poor little new girl stood a very small chance of asserting herself against it. They were much like sheep, both in the upper and the lower playrooms at Wootton Beeches; and the party that followed Margaret Hulme in one room was like the party that followed Jean in the other. In both cases it only needed some one a little stronger than the rest to be the leader; and Jean, in spite of her inferiority in age, supplied the strength, or what her school-fellows mistook for it, in a certain doggedness of temper that pulled them along in her wake. Most of them found it so unpleasant to be in her bad books, that she had very little difficulty in managing them.
Barbara turned appealingly to Angela. ‘Why is Jean so cross with me?’ she asked. ‘I haven’t done anything to her, have I?’
‘Not done anything?’ echoed Angela, looking over her shoulder for Jean’s support. ‘Why, you went and told Margaret Hulme that Jean hadn’t given you Finny’s message, and––’
‘Sneak! Tell-tale!’ sneered Jean again.
Barbara suddenly looked immensely relieved, and smiled in a friendly manner at the enemy. At least this was a misunderstanding that she could clear up. ‘Is that all?’ she cried. ‘No wonder you were cross, if you thought that. Of course I never said a word about it to Margaret Hulme, or any one else; I suppose she guessed, or something. But why didn’t you give me the message? It would have saved such a lot of bother, wouldn’t it?’
‘Well,’ gasped Jean, as though words almost failed her, ‘I never heard such wicked story-telling!’