figure,' 'Margaret has put the others out,'
'Margaret has gone wrong,' 'Margaret Hulme has clean forgotten everything,
and she's got to step out,' were the various forms in which the news
travelled down to the end of the file, the last of all being the version
of Angela Wilkins and therefore generally discredited.

'I don't believe a word of it!' said Jean, stoutly.

'Why, Margaret couldn't go wrong if she tried,' exclaimed Barbara, whose
belief in the head girl, though slow in coming, was quite equal by this
time to Jean's.

'She has, though,' declared Angela, who stood with Mary Wells just in
front of Jean and Barbara.

Mary Wells, who had stepped out of rank on hearing the surprising news,
now returned, and in her slow and conscientious manner proceeded to
reprove Angela.

'How you do exaggerate, Angela!' she said, frowning. 'Margaret only went
a little wrong; and she's caught up again all right. Isn't it funny,
though?' she was obliged to add immediately, with a thrill of amazement
in her voice.

The two children behind her for once were dumb. The head girl, according
to their simple creed, could do no wrong; so when she did, what words had
they left to use? Babs was the first to see a way out of the difficulty.

'I know,' she said. 'I expect she's nervous. It makes you forget like
anything, if you're nervous. Once, when Egbert was being prepared for
confirmation, he was so nervous--it was a strange clergyman, you know,
and Egbert said he blinked--that he clean forgot his catechism, even
the easy first part about your godfathers and godmothers. So that's why
Margaret forgot her steps, you see if it wasn't!'

'Nervous!' echoed Jean, incredulously. 'Who ever saw Margaret nervous?
Do you think she'd be able to make every new kid who comes to the school
quake in her shoes if she was _nervous_?'

'I don't know,' answered Babs, doubtfully. Margaret Hulme had certainly
never made her quake in her shoes, even when she was a new girl; but
she did not admit this to Jean. 'Egbert can make people afraid of him
too,' she went on, 'and he can thrash any chap you please, and he always
washes his head in cold water _every_ morning, even if there's ice, and he
has more ties and clothes and things than all the others put together,
and he's awfully grand and splendid, Egbert is,--but all the same, he was
frightened of that strange clergyman. Can you see Egbert?' she concluded
proudly. 'He's at the end of them all, next to J