When the prayer-bell rang that evening, it interrupted a wild tumult in the junior playroom. The elder girls had rushed through the curtain, on the terrified summons of Angela Wilkins; and the whole school crowded and thronged round a confused heap in the middle of the floor. Nothing much was to be seen except two lanky black legs, a crumpled white frock, and a good deal of untidy brown hair; and at first nobody did anything but stare and exclaim. The ringing of the prayer-bell, however, brought them all to their senses. Margaret Hulme made a sudden dash at the two combatants, picked up the one that came first, and dropped her in a corner of the room, where she could be hidden from view until she had time to recover herself. Then the head girl turned to the child who still lay sobbing and gasping on the floor.
‘You get up and behave yourself!’ she said in a stern undertone; and Jean Murray struggled to her feet and went off snivelling, to be comforted by the trembling and excited Angela. Then the elder girls melted away again into their own room, and a kind of uneasy hush settled down on the eighty-seven inhabitants of Wootton Beeches.
Barbara rubbed her eyes and stared wildly round her. A solid wall of girls stood between her and the scene of the recent scuffle; she could not see what had become of her victim, and at first she did not even realise what was producing this wonderful calm. Then the girls in front of her began slowly to move away towards the archway; and once she caught a glimpse through the curtain of the door in the room beyond. It was only a glimpse, for the girls closed up again immediately; but it was enough to show her the stately figure of Miss Finlayson, as she stood and wished her pupils good-night, one by one. Barbara had watched the same ceremony for a good many evenings now, but it had never seemed quite so orderly or so solemn before. To-night, it made a peculiar impression on the wild little tomboy who had been brought up without discipline or control, and the strangeness and the misery of her position overwhelmed her as with a new feeling. At the same instant, in striking contrast to the dismal reality, came the remembrance of the dream she had dreamed all her life about this very place called school; and, unnoticed by her school-fellows, who were fully occupied in trying to behave as if nothing had happened, she broke down and sobbed bitterly in her corner.
The stream of girls that had been filing past Miss Finlayson came to an end at last; but Miss Finlayson did not follow them immediately to the chapel. Far away, in a distant corner of the junior playroom, crouched a dishevelled little girl in a crumpled frock, weeping dolefully for a dream that had never come true; and Miss Finlayson stood and waited in her place by the door.
A sense of the extreme stillness, now that the footsteps of the girls had ceased, slowly impressed itself upon Barbara; and she looked up with a new feeling of alarm. There, through the opening in the curtain, she could see the stately figure of the head-mistress in the room beyond; and Babs thrust a round, inky ball of a handkerchief into her pocket, and hastened towards her in a panic.
‘I didn’t know you were waiting for me,’ she said, fighting to keep the quiver out of her voice. ‘I didn’t know they had all gone. I–I’d forgotten it was prayers now.’
She knocked over a chair as she stumbled across the room, and once her dress caught on the edge of a desk and stopped her; but Miss Finlayson waited with her hand out, and the little new girl reached her at last. Once more, behind the grave glance of the blue-grey eyes, lurked a suggestion of something softer and more human, and it gave Barbara a little courage.
‘I wasn’t crying because I was sorry I’d thumped Jean Murray,’ she burst out. ‘I’m not a bit sorry, not a bit! I’d like to thump her again for saying–for saying––’
It sounded uncommonly like telling tales, and she had to stop. Miss Finlayson still had hold of her hand, and still looked down at her with the mixture of expressions on her face.
‘Are you coming up to prayers, Babs?’ was all she said.