‘Please, I’ve come to know if you want your boots unlaced,’ said Barbara, rather faintly. She was fully prepared to be laughed at again for her pains; and, indeed, it did seem a most ridiculous suggestion to make to any one. But the head girl treated it as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
‘Of course I do. Do you want to do them to-day?’ was her reply, and she immediately put her right foot a little forward and went on talking to her eleven.
‘Oh, but I don’t want to take them off,’ cried Babs, eagerly. ‘I only thought––’
But Margaret was too deep in her conversation to pay any attention to the youngest girl in the school; and Barbara knelt down unwillingly and struggled with a stubborn knot in a muddy bootlace. She had hardly begun her unattractive task, when some one dropped suddenly beside her on the floor and laid a hot hand on hers.
‘You leave the head girl’s boots alone!’ said Jean’s voice in her ear. ‘It’s just like your interfering ways, to come sneaking up to her when I wasn’t looking. Go away and mind your own business!’
Now, Babs had just been resenting deeply the absurdity of her position at the feet of the head girl. She did not want to take off anybody’s boots, and she thought it an exceedingly stupid thing to do. But to give up her task because some one came and got cross about it, was quite another matter. A lurking spirit of mischief, helped by the exhilaration she still felt after her two hours in the open air, made her retain her hold on the knot in the head girl’s bootlace.
‘I am minding my own business,’ she retorted stoutly. ‘Ever since I’ve been here, you and Angela have dinned the head girl’s boots into my ears till I’m sick of hearing about the stupid things. Now I’m here, I’m not going to stop till I’ve done them; so you’d better go away yourself.’
‘What in the name of wonder are you children doing down there?’