ing 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 w