e trap clattered noisily out of sight.

The few short, vigorous sentences with which Miss Finlayson improved
the next five minutes sent the girls into the hockey field with a
much reduced opinion of themselves. Margaret Hulme stayed behind to
vindicate the offenders as well as she could; and the result was that the
head-mistress remembered it was the last day of the term, and blamed
herself for having almost allowed her feelings for the youngest girl
in school to run away with her.

'Send Jean and Angela up to my bedroom at once,' she said thoughtfully,
when Margaret had finished telling her what had been going on in the
playroom that morning.

She waited for them on the landing, and kissed them both very
affectionately when they appeared hand in hand. She glanced quickly
from Angela's red and swollen countenance to Jean's pale and miserable
one, and she decided not to say what had been in her mind the minute
before. A much better idea struck her, and she acted upon it promptly.

'If you will promise me to be as quiet as mice,' she whispered, 'you shall
both have one peep at her.'

The room into which she led them on tiptoe was almost dark. The only light
that was admitted came from one small window in the farther corner, and it
was just enough to reveal Jill, as she bent over the bed with a cup in
her hand. Then she moved away, and the two children, peeping from their
hiding-place behind the screen by the door, saw Barbara.

She lay flat on her back among the white pillows; a hillock under the
bedclothes showed where the cage protected her broken leg, and a bandage
round her head kept the thick, dark hair from tumbling over her face as
it usually did. Otherwise, she was not nearly so much altered as her
play-fellows had vaguely expected to find her. The bright little eyes
gleamed out as impishly as ever from beneath the white bandage, and as
she smiled up at Jill they realised to their intense relief that the Babe,
with a hole in her head and a cage over her leg, was much the same Babe
who had arrived in their midst, with her elf-like look and her happy
unconscious smile, three months ago.

'Why, Jean, I do believe you're crying,' said Angela, in surprise, when
Miss Finlayson had pushed them outside again, and they were retreating
slowly along the gallery. Angela herself felt no further inclination to
cry, now that she had seen the Babe and found she was not a bit altered.
There was no middle course in Angela's