‘Nor I either,’ chimed in Angela, putting her arm round Jean’s waist. ‘She’s done nothing but tell crams ever since she’s been here. Come away, Jean, dear; she isn’t fit to be argued with.’
The pair of them marched off, consumed with righteous wrath, to the other end of the playroom. Babs, overwhelmed with the incredible idea that any one should suppose her capable of telling an untruth about anything, waited speechlessly for some one to interfere and take her part. But those of her school-fellows who had been listening to the dispute hastily followed the example of their leader, and ignored her entirely. They did not stop to think whether they were being just; if the new girl told stories–and Jean Murray said she did–it was certainly their duty to teach her a lesson. When they looked for her presently, to see how she was bearing their displeasure, they found she was no longer there.
Upstairs, in the small, bare bedroom, the one spot where she felt safe from the intrusion of horrible wicked people with horrible wicked thoughts in them, the forlorn little new girl was covering page after page of the ruled note-paper Auntie Anna had given her, with an ill-written, ill-spelt account of her woes.
‘Dear, dear boys,’ she wrote; ‘I am very misserable. Everything is horible. At least, that is not quite true. Finny is nice she is like Auntie Anna and Nurse, and I’ve got a bedroom of my very own we all have but mine is one of the nicest becourse it comes at the corner of the house and looks over a wall into the orchard and there’s a plant with bunches of red beries that climes round my window and nobody else has red berrys round their window but only me. Finny has lots of ripping books in her study and she has father’s book and she is very nice but the girls are beests I hate girls! Girls tell stories and they say you do things when you don’t and they are awfull beests. They laugh at you every time you open your mouth but I don’t mind their siliness so much it’s their untruthfull hatefullness that I hate. I have never been so miserable I wish father had never gone to that beestly America and I wish Auntie Anna would come and fetch me back again. Do do ask her to come and take me away from all those hatefull girls, tell her how miserabble I am you don’t know any of you what it is to be really misserable, etc. etc.’
She had reached about the fifth page of this wild epistle when her door flew open; and Ruth Oliver looked in, with a perturbed look on her good-humoured face.
‘Why, there you are!’ she exclaimed. ‘Didn’t you hear the dinner-bell? We’re half-way through the first course. Whatever are you doing?’
Barbara began folding up her letter and forcing it with trembling hands into an envelope. ‘I’ve been writing home,’ she said, and her voice quivered. Of course, everything she did was wrong; but what did dinner matter when there was her letter home to be written?
‘My dear child, we’re not allowed to write letters except on Wednesday afternoons. Make haste and put the thing away, do,’ said Ruth, impatiently. The sudden look of distress on the child’s face touched her, and she added more kindly–‘Well, well, bring it downstairs with you, Babe, and perhaps Finny will give you leave to send it to-day. Only, do come.’
Miss Finlayson not only gave her leave, but even offered to deliver the letter herself, as she happened to be going to pay a call near Crofts that same afternoon. It consoled Babs a little to feel that the boys would not have to wait until the morning to learn how miserable she was; at the same time, her present situation was no easier to bear, for all the younger girls took a thoughtless pleasure in talking at her, whenever Jean was present; and it was not nice to be with people who made remarks about her, and yet pretended all the time that she was not there. The early part of the afternoon at Wootton Beeches was given up to playing games in the nine-acre field, which was marked out, during the winter, into hockey grounds; and here Babs found herself, soon after dinner, strolling aimlessly along by the hedge and wondering what there was about her that made eighty-seven girls detest her so heartily. When she suddenly remembered how much she had looked forward to playing real games with real schoolgirls, her disappointment was too much for her, and the tears rolled rapidly down her cheeks.
‘Why, here’s the new girl, Barbara Berkeley. She’ll do,’ said a brisk voice behind her, and the games-mistress descended upon her with a hasty request ‘not to hide away in corners when she was wanted.’