uired the head girl, sarcastically, looking back
again. She once more scanned Barbara all over, and smiled in an annoying
manner to herself. 'However did Jill manage to have a cousin like you?'
she asked; and the other girls laughed more than before.

'I don't know,' said Barbara, with a touch of scorn in her voice. The
mysterious way in which the head girl and her admirers were laughing at
her was very different from the frank teasing she was accustomed to; and
it gave her a sudden wish to assert herself. 'I never pretended to be
like Jill, or like any of you! I--I don't think I want to be like you,
either. In my home, we don't laugh behind people's backs.'

She caused quite a small sensation in the group round the fire. One or
two began to titter afresh, and then stopped, waiting for the head girl
to take the lead. The head girl was equal to the occasion.

'It is very certain, then, that you have stayed in your own home quite
long enough,' she remarked coldly, and resumed her conversation with her
friends.

The two children dragged Barbara through the curtain into the next room.

'Well, you _have_ got some cheek!' gasped Jean Murray, staring at her.
'Lucky for you that you're a new girl! If it had been _me_, Margaret Hulme
wouldn't have spoken to me for a whole day.'

The enormity of such a punishment did not for the moment impress Barbara
much. What she did notice was that her passage of words with the head
girl had broken the ice of her introduction to the junior playroom,
especially with the aid of Angela's highly coloured account of it.

'You never saw such a thing!' she was exclaiming rapidly to the circle
that formed round her. 'There was Margaret, looking like a dozen
thunder-clouds rolled into one, and there was the new girl, grinning from
ear to ear, not caring a bit what anybody thought of her and just
standing up to the head girl as if she was in the First herself.'

The new girl barely recognised this description of herself; but as it
made her an object of curiosity, if not of sympathy, in the junior
playroom, she did not feel inclined to correct the picture that the
red-haired, freckled little chatterbox was painting of her. Anything was
better than being left out in the cold again. It struck her too that
the girls in the junior room were far less inclined to laugh at her
than the elder ones had seemed; and it raised her fallen spirits a
little to find that the children who were now strolling up to