e 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.

Barbara had not even heard the question. She was full of her grievance
against Jean Murray, which she had almost forgotten for the minute; and
she burst out again, more angrily than before.

'Don't you understand?' she cried passionately. 'I wasn't crying for
_that_; it--it was something else, but I can't tell you what it was,
because you'd only laugh. They all laugh--except when they're just being
horrible! Why didn't you let me run away last week? I don't want to stop
with people like Jean Murray, and--and all the rest of them; I hate being
here, I hate the girls, I hate you! Why won't you let me go away?'

She hardly knew what she was saying. She had not been in such a passion
since the dreary day, two years ago, when they took her nurse away from
her, and she had made herself ill with fretting.

Miss Finlayson tightened her grasp on the hand that was struggling to free
itself; then she bent over her rebellious little pupil, and laid her other
hand against her burning cheek.

'Are you coming up to prayers, Babs?' she repeated. Her persistence began
to take effect, and the cool t