eady. Babs certainly
did not need an illness to make her absent-minded.

'Then who is coming to see me after tea?' was Barbara's next inquiry.

'I said Kit might come; I thought you would like to have him best,'
answered Jill.

'Kit? Is he going to bicycle over from Crofts?' asked the child.

'Why, no,' explained Jill, smiling. 'They have all been in the house ever
since you were taken ill. Finny invited them to stay, you know, and Auntie
Anna too.'

Barbara laughed a little. 'They'll never be able to tease me again, now
that they've stopped in a girl's school themselves,' she remarked with a
chuckle.

There was a pause, which the invalid occupied in thinking over the
things she had been too lazy to consider before. She had a great many
questions to ask, but somehow it was too much exertion to ask them.
Fortunately, Jill was so clever that she always guessed what she wanted
to know without waiting to be asked first; and that saved a lot of
trouble. In this way the child had learned that the gymnastic prize was
to be divided between Jean and herself; and thinking about the gymnastic
prize produced another question from her, rather unexpectedly.

'Wasn't it Scales who moved the trapeze away?' she asked.

Jill looked up surprised. None of them knew how much Babs remembered of
what had happened on the night of her accident. 'Yes,' she replied. 'He
has been very unhappy about it, poor man! He writes every day from Hanover
to say how miserable he is. But, of course, it was an accident.'

'Of course,' said Barbara, looking distressed; and Jill was afraid she
had said too much.

'Shall I write and send him a message from you?' she suggested quickly.
Babs brightened up, and nodded.

'Tell him it's awfully jolly to be ill and to have every one doing things
for you, and bringing you sweets, and all that,' she said eagerly. 'And
say that if he wants me to pay him out, just to make us quits, don't you
know, he can think of the awful way I am sure to play my pieces next term.'

'Very well,' answered Jill, laughing; and there was silence once more.

Jill looked very pretty as she sat there by the window, working away
at her embroidery in the frame; and Babs congratulated herself, with a
glow of satisfaction, on having made her a princess in her fairy
kingdom. It was so nice of Jill, she reflected, to behave exactly like a
princess, and to sit at the window of her lonely turret making tapestry,
to while away the time unt