e Jean.

'Now,' she said sternly, 'what do you both mean by behaving in this
disgraceful manner?'

Neither of them answered her. Jean hung her head and looked as if she were
going to cry every minute, and Barbara waited to see what would happen
next. It did not seem to her that she had done anything so very dreadful,
and she wondered why no one saw how funny it all was. Ruth Oliver was
looking the other way, so she could not see her face; but the rest of
them seemed just as serious about it as the head girl herself.

'Haven't you anything to say for yourselves?' demanded Margaret.

Hot, angry tears began to well up into Jean's eyes. She never knew she
could have hated any one so much as she hated this new girl for coming
between her and Margaret Hulme. Barbara caught sight of her tears, and
the desire to laugh suddenly left her.

'You see, we didn't know who had got to unlace your boots,' she explained
hastily. 'It isn't that it's such an awfully jolly thing to unlace
people's boots, but----'

'Oh, that's it, is it?' interrupted Margaret, crushingly. 'Then you
needn't be in the same difficulty any more on my account, for in future
I shall unlace my own boots. Now, go away and do your preparation at
once, and don't let me see either of you again for the rest of the day.'

Babs went off obediently to find her books, and she puzzled greatly as
she went over the displeasure of Margaret Hulme. 'Such a fuss to make
about _boots_,' she remarked to Charlotte Bigley, whose bookshelf was next
to hers. But even Charlotte was not proof against the furious account of
the matter that Jean Murray had just been giving to a sympathetic circle
of friends; and Barbara soon found that she had quite lost the little
popularity she might have gained in the hockey field by her behaviour
over the head girl's boots.

'I think she must be mad,' declared Angela, in the buzz of conversation
that preceeded the call for 'Silence' from the presiding French teacher.
'She looked as though she wanted to kill Jean. I was looking at her all
the time, and I was quite frightened. She ought to be watched, I'm certain
she ought.'

'She ought not to be spoken to by any one,' wailed Jean, hiding behind an
open atlas to avoid the scrutiny of Mademoiselle, who sat in the archway
between the two playrooms. 'Perhaps, if every one leaves her alone she'll
learn how to behave like other people.'

Left alone she accordingly was, since Jean Murray had so decre