king down at her with an odd sort of smile on his
face. 'That reminds me,' he said--though how it reminded him the child
could not for the moment imagine--'that your cousin Miss Urquhart charged
me with a message for you. She sent you her love and promised to write
soon. I hope I have given it correctly.'

'Oh!' cried Barbara, with great excitement. 'Do you know Jill?' The doctor
kept hold of her hand and nodded. 'And Auntie Anna? And the boys--_all_
of them? Then you must know Kit!'

'Yes,' said Dr. Hurst, grimly. 'I was the beast.'

Then he stooped and kissed her cheek very stiffly, as if he were not used
to kissing people; and then he went away. Like Ruth Oliver, he had found
it difficult to feel nervous of the youngest girl in the school.

Barbara climbed on the window-seat, and flattened her nose against the
window-pane, and watched the lamps of the doctor's trap receding down the
drive. 'I like doctors; don't you, Miss Finlayson?' she inquired, when
that lady came back into the study.

Miss Finlayson agreed that she liked doctors very much indeed, and
she began to write something in a big book, while Babs knelt on the
window-seat and stared out into the rain and the darkness. Suddenly she
jumped down from her perch with a cry of dismay.

'What's the matter now?' asked the head-mistress, absently.

'I must have called him a beast!' gasped Barbara.

'I think I heard something like it,' observed Miss Finlayson, still
writing.

'But--but I didn't mean that _he_ was a beast,' proceeded Barbara, looking
distressed. 'I meant that somebody else was a beast. It wasn't my fault
that somebody else was _him_, was it, Miss Finlayson?'

'It would be safer, I think, and perhaps a little more considerate, not to
call anybody a beast,' remarked the head-mistress, gravely. 'Then these
little mistakes would be avoided.'

'I never will again,' sighed Babs. 'It's such a particular pity, because
he isn't a bit like a real beast, is he?'

Miss Finlayson looked up while she dried the page she had just written.
'Have you finished your letters home?' she inquired pleasantly. 'The
prayer-bell will ring in about a quarter of an hour.'

The reminder sent Barbara straight out of the room, and she sped swiftly
back across the hall, thinking busily. Clearly, the only reparation
she could make to the doctor was to transform him from a beast into a
fairy prince, and to offer him a place in her fairy kingdom; but he
would be rather l