e platform. They looked very small and slight as they stood there
in their short red frocks against a solid background of people; but they
had quite lost every suspicion of bashfulness, and Babs even began to
look upon the whole thing as an immense joke. She nodded gaily to the boys
in the gallery, and smiled happily at Auntie Anna, who had the place
of honour on the platform next to the Canon; and in the silence that
followed, while Charlotte Bigley was jumping from rung to rung of the
horizontal ladder, she occupied herself in trying to decide on her own
exercise. If Jean chose leaving go with one hand, she should swing
and let go and catch on to the trapeze beyond--at least, if Hurly-Burly
would only be decent and give her leave. She half hoped that Jean _would_
choose the other; for she had practised the trapeze one, only last week,
and----

A sudden murmur, followed by a faint attempt at applause, roused her; and
she saw Charlotte Bigley walking slowly back to the anteroom with her eyes
fixed on the ground.

'What happened? I didn't see,' she whispered, nudging Jean.

'Hand slipped, fell off,' answered Jean, briefly, as she went forward and
grasped the rings.

She did choose swinging and letting go with one hand, and she went through
it very successfully, and earned every bit of the applause that greeted
her when she finished. Barbara was so delighted that she went on clapping
her loudly after everybody else had stopped, and did not notice what she
was doing till the audience began to laugh and Hurly-Burly came up and
spoke to her.

'May I have the trapeze let down?' whispered Babs, eagerly. 'I want to
let go of the rings and catch on to it at the end of my swing--like I did
the other day.'

Hurly-Burly looked doubtful. 'Are you sure you can manage it?' she asked.

Barbara pleaded, and the games-mistress gave in. It was always difficult
for any one so practical as Miss Burleigh to understand the odd little
pupil, who at one moment could throw herself into a game as heartily as a
boy, and at another was liable to exasperate her companions by going
off into a dream and completely forgetting what she was doing. But it was
impossible to help liking the child, and Hurly-Burly, who had a sneaking
conviction that the trapeze exercise would decide the prize in her favour,
could not resist the temptation to let her have her own way and secure
to herself at the same time a little reflected glory. For it was she
who h