from Mrs. Muir, into whose room she had slipped at
tea-time, very little had been dragged out. Yet it was certain that
something tremendous had happened. If she wanted to know what, her one
hope lay with Barrie.

"Very well," she said, with the proper mingling of kindness and dignity,
"I will bring in the tray."

The door immediately opened, and closed again after the flat figure of
Miss Hepburn. Barrie thought that if the good Janet had been born a fish
she would have been a skate, or at roundest a sole. Even her profile was
flat, as if the two sides of her face had been pressed firmly together
by a strong pair of hands. She wore her hair very flat on her head,
which was flat behind; and just at the nape of the neck was a flat
drab-tinted knot, of almost the same grayish-yellowish brown as her
complexion. On her flat breast was a flat brooch with a braid of pale
hair as a background. Even her voice sounded flat in its effort at
meekness and self-repression, calculated to appease Mrs. MacDonald in
trying circumstances. Miss Hepburn looked about forty-five; but she had
always looked forty-five for the last twelve years, and Barrie could
hardly have believed that she had ever been younger.

"Your grandmother thinks that you have now been sufficiently punished,"
she announced, "and you are to come down as usual to prayers."

"Oh, am I?" echoed Barrie. "We'll see about that. As for punishment, if
it pleases Grandma to think she's punished me, she may. I don't care.
She couldn't have made me come out of my room to-day if she tried. But I
don't bear _you_ any grudge, Heppie. I'm very glad to see you. I want
you to tell me things."

"What things?" inquired Miss Hepburn. "I didn't come to talk. I am here
simply to see you begin your supper. You must be--er--very hungry."

"I've had plenty of food all day," said Barrie--"food for thought." She
cleared a place on the one table by pushing a few school-books out of
the way. She had been sitting in the twilight, for she was not allowed
to have matches. Their possession might have tempted her to burn gas
after ten o'clock, when at latest all lights had to be out. Now, Janet
Hepburn brought a box of matches on the tray; and the gas, when lit,
showed the sparsely furnished room with its gray-painted, pictureless
wall, against which Barrie's red hair glowed like a flame. Outside the
open window the old ivy and the young peeping roses, which had been
green and pink and gold in the