‘Now,’ she said sternly, ‘what do you both mean by behaving in this disgraceful manner?’
Neither of them answered her. Jean hung her head and looked as if she were going to cry every minute, and Barbara waited to see what would happen next. It did not seem to her that she had done anything so very dreadful, and she wondered why no one saw how funny it all was. Ruth Oliver was looking the other way, so she could not see her face; but the rest of them seemed just as serious about it as the head girl herself.
‘Haven’t you anything to say for yourselves?’ demanded Margaret.
Hot, angry tears began to well up into Jean’s eyes. She never knew she could have hated any one so much as she hated this new girl for coming between her and Margaret Hulme. Barbara caught sight of her tears, and the desire to laugh suddenly left her.
‘You see, we didn’t know who had got to unlace your boots,’ she explained hastily. ‘It isn’t that it’s such an awfully jolly thing to unlace people’s boots, but––’
‘Oh, that’s it, is it?’ interrupted Margaret, crushingly. ‘Then you needn’t be in the same difficulty any more on my account, for in future I shall unlace my own boots. Now, go away and do your preparation at once, and don’t let me see either of you again for the rest of the day.’
Babs went off obediently to find her books, and she puzzled greatly as she went over the displeasure of Margaret Hulme. ‘Such a fuss to make about boots,’ she remarked to Charlotte Bigley, whose bookshelf was next to hers. But even Charlotte was not proof against the furious account of the matter that Jean Murray had just been giving to a sympathetic circle of friends; and Barbara soon found that she had quite lost the little popularity she might have gained in the hockey field by her behaviour over the head girl’s boots.
‘I think she must be mad,’ declared Angela, in the buzz of conversation that preceeded the call for ‘Silence’ from the presiding French teacher. ‘She looked as though she wanted to kill Jean. I was looking at her all the time, and I was quite frightened. She ought to be watched, I’m certain she ought.’
‘She ought not to be spoken to by any one,’ wailed Jean, hiding behind an open atlas to avoid the scrutiny of Mademoiselle, who sat in the archway between the two playrooms. ‘Perhaps, if every one leaves her alone she’ll learn how to behave like other people.’
Left alone she accordingly was, since Jean Murray had so decreed it; and this time there were no half-measures about it. At tea-time, and again at the supper table, the girls on either side of her turned their backs upon her and talked busily to their other neighbours; and in the playroom afterwards she found herself just as scrupulously avoided. It was decidedly an uncomfortable state of things for the new girl, as it was meant to be by those who were responsible for making it; but somehow the new girl did not seem to mind it half so much as they would have expected. All the evening she sat in the corner of the juniors’ room by herself, and any one would have said from the look on her face that she did not care whether the others spoke to her or not. Now and then she smiled, as she sat there with her elbows perched on her knees and her chin supported on her hands; and the whole time her look of supreme unconsciousness never left her.