her head down and made a charge straight at the offender;
and Egbert, being unprepared for the attack, fell backwards over the
footstool, with his small sister on the top of him, while Robin wriggled
free of them both and set up a louder howl than before in his surprise
and dismay.

In the middle of the hubbub the door opened; and a voice, that attracted
their attention at once because it was strange to them, made itself heard
through the tumult.

'Is there anybody here who is called Babs?' asked the new-comer.

CHAPTER II

A WITCH IN A STEEPLE-HAT

Barbara picked herself up and looked towards the door. A girl of about
eighteen stood there--an exceedingly pretty girl in a pretty frock, as the
Berkeley boys might have noticed if they had been given to noticing things
of this kind. But her regular features and her pink-and-white complexion
and her reddish-brown hair made very little impression upon them, and
they only saw that she was dressed in a grown-up manner that was rather
against her than otherwise. They decided, with the hasty judgment of a
large family, that she was much too grand to be treated as a companion;
and they prepared, quite unnecessarily, to resent any attempt of hers to
be patronising.

Nothing was further from Jill's mind than to be patronising. She had never
patronised any one in her life, not even the younger children at school,
who always expected to be patronised; and she was not likely to begin now,
with a set of schoolboys who frightened her out of her wits. For she had
never had anything to do with boys before, and she had been dreading
this moment ever since her return from abroad. She fully expected they
would play practical jokes upon her, as the schoolboys in books always
did; and she was not reassured by the uproar that met her ears when she
opened the schoolroom door. It was ridiculous that she should feel shy,
after travelling about for a whole year and meeting all sorts of people;
but as she stood rather helplessly in the doorway, she certainly found
that she was too shy to make the first advances.

The boys hesitated, and waited for one another to begin. Egbert, who
could not forget that he had just been rolling on the floor, was brushing
himself down and looking self-conscious; and it was Christopher who
remembered his manners first and came forward with his hand out.

'How do you do?' he began in his solemn, precise way. 'Won't you come and
sit down? There's an arm