‘It’s no good,’ sighed Barbara, looking disconsolately round the room; ‘we shall never get straight in time. Don’t you think we had better leave it, and let Auntie Anna see us as we really are? She will only be disappointed afterwards, if we begin by being tidy; and I don’t like disappointing people, do you?’

There was a shout of laughter when she finished speaking, and Barbara frowned. She never knew why the boys laughed at her when she tried to explain her reasons for doing things, but they always did.

‘Is that why you have put on your very shortest frock?’ asked Wilfred, who was brewing something in a saucepan over the fire. ‘I believe you think that if Auntie Anna saw you for the first time in your Sunday frock, she might suppose you were a nice, proper little girl, instead of––’

Barbara seized the sofa cushion and aimed it at him threateningly. ‘Instead of what?’ she demanded.Wilfred was at a disadvantage, owing to his position as well as to the precious quality of the liquid in the saucepan; and he felt it wiser to make terms. ‘Well,’ he observed, ‘you might at least have put on a longer frock for the credit of the family; now, mightn’t you?’

Barbara looked down at her blue serge skirt, edged with certain rows of white braid that only made it look shorter; and she gave it a pull to make it fall a little lower over the slim black legs that appeared beneath it. ‘It’s not my fault that I have just come from a gymnastic class,’ she protested. ‘Besides, my Sunday frock is only two inches longer! What difference does two inches make, even if we have got an aunt coming? You’re so particular, Wilfred.’

‘Stick to your chemicals, Will, and leave the Babe alone,’ growled Egbert, who was trying to read a novel on the sofa and found the conversation disturbing.

It was not often that the eldest of the family troubled himself about the disputes of the others, and Barbara was encouraged to go on. ‘Besides,’ she added, ‘there isn’t time to change now. Auntie Anna will arrive directly; and who is going to tidy up the schoolroom if I don’t?’

Certainly, no one responded to her appeal. Egbert and Wilfred became suddenly and suspiciously interested in what they were doing, while the two other boys, who were seated on the edge of the table, continued to swing their legs lazily backwards and forwards without making an effort to help her. Barbara turned upon them reproachfully.

‘It is perfectly horrible of you to sit there laughing, when a strange aunt and a strange daughter may be here at any minute!’ she declared. ‘I think you might do something, Peter.’

‘Not much!’ laughed Peter, a tall, broad-shouldered fellow of fifteen or so. ‘It’s good for little girls to do things, and keeps them from growing out of all their clothes.’

‘Chuck it, Babs!’ advised the younger of the two. ‘What does it matter whether she thinks we live in a pig-sty or not?’

Barbara looked at them doubtfully, then picked up a pile of ragged music and staggered across to the cupboard, shot the music into it, and closed the door just in time to prevent her load from recoiling upon her. A derisive chuckle from the boys on the table greeted her first attempt at tidying up; but she went on resolutely.

‘Visitors have no business to come and see people at a day’s notice like this,’ she complained, as she swept a handful of rusty nails, empty gum bottles, and other evidences of past occupations into a crowded waste-paper basket.

Christopher stopped laughing as she said this, and a change crept over his pale, rather delicate features. ‘When the visitor is an aunt,’ he said with energy, ‘a day’s notice is more than enough.’He associated the aunt in question with certain reforms that had taken place from time to time in the household; and he had never forgiven her for inducing their father, just two years ago, to dismiss the nurse they had all adored and to send Robin and himself to a hated day-school. There was no knowing what innovations they might not be forced to accept, now that she was going to descend upon them in person.

Peter chuckled again. Most things to Peter were an occasion for a chuckle. ‘That depends on the spirit in which she comes,’ he remarked, and he turned his pockets graphically inside out. ‘An aunt who has a big place in the country, and can afford to travel about in beastly holes like Munich and the Italian lakes––’

‘And can pick up other people’s daughters and adopt them,’ chimed in Christopher, ‘just because their fathers died fighting in the Soudan and their mothers died–how did their mothers die, Egbert?’

‘Penniless,’ grunted Egbert, in response to the kick his book had just received. ‘That’s why the kid got adopted, of course.’

‘Well,’ proceeded Peter, putting his pockets back and nodding wisely, ‘if an aunt like that doesn’t behave decently to her deserving nephews––’

‘And niece,’ added Babs from the back of the sofa, where she had just deposited a bundle of old schoolbooks.

Peter went on unabashed. ‘To her deserving nephews and undeserving niece,’ he said, smiling, ‘then she’ll be an awful old dragon!’

‘There’s something in that,’ observed Wilfred, taking the saucepan over to the window for inspection. ‘Perhaps she’ll give me those new retorts and things I want for my laboratory–if I ever get a laboratory,’ he added with a sigh.

‘Perhaps she’ll send me straight to college without expecting me to grind for a musty old scholarship,’ said Egbert, condescending to take a share in the conversation.

‘If she asks me down to Crofts for the shooting, that will be good enough for me,’ observed Peter, drawing a long breath of anticipation.

Barbara came slowly into the middle of the room and stood there, quite unconscious of her rumpled hair and of the streak of dust that was smeared across her face. ‘I wonder what Auntie Anna will do for me?’ she murmured, more to herself than to the others. ‘I hope, I do hope it will be something new and interesting and beautiful!’

Christopher overheard her, and roused himself. He slipped off the table and walked to his favourite position on the hearthrug, giving an unnecessary pull to the child’s hair as he passed her, which was an attention, however, that she showed no signs of resenting. Babs never resented anything that Kit chose to do to her; besides, she wanted to hear what he was going to say. Whenever Kit stood like that, with his back to the fire and his legs rather wide apart, he was always going to say something. The odd thing was, that there was something so convincing in his way of saying it that the family generally listened.

‘Don’t you fret yourselves, any of you,’ he said decidedly. ‘Auntie Anna isn’t going to make things pleasant for anybody in this house–not she! Hasn’t she persuaded father to do whatever she likes, all our lives?’

‘What is she going to make him do now, then?’ asked Wilfred, who did not mean to give up his dream of a laboratory without a protest.

‘First of all,’ said Christopher, with an air of confidence, ‘she’ll see that Egbert has a crammer next summer holidays; and he’ll either have to get that scholarship, or he doesn’t go to Oxford at all! She’ll talk about discipline, and things like that. Aunts always do talk about discipline, when it’s for other people’s children.’

‘I wish you’d shut up,’ grumbled Egbert, returning to his book. ‘How is a fellow to read when you’re making such a clatter?’

‘Then there’s Peter,’ continued Christopher, calmly. ‘Of course she’ll say he’s much too young to be trusted with a gun, though he is such an overgrown, hulking chap; and why isn’t he in the fifth instead of the upper fourth, at his age?’

‘What do you know about it, you youngest-but-two?’ shouted Peter, wrathfully.

Kit peered at him through his spectacles, and went on as impudently as ever. He was never afraid to speak his mind, for none of the others would have dreamed of laying a finger, except in fun, on the one brother who was not strong enough to defend himself; and Kit knew this, as well as he knew his superiority over them in the matter of brains. The only wonder was that the knowledge had not made him a prig. Perhaps it would have been difficult, though, in the hurly-burly of the Berkeley family, for any one to have been a prig.

‘As for Wilfred,’ he resumed, ‘she’ll upset all his ambitions before he can turn round. Do you suppose she’ll encourage his messing about with things in saucepans, just because he wants to be a doctor? Not she! She’ll talk about some rotten business in the City instead. Aunts always know millions of places in the City where they can shove their unwilling nephews.’

‘Oh, I say, dry up!’ objected Wilfred, who was already sufficiently depressed by the discovery that the brew in the saucepan was not a success.

‘Then she’ll pack Robin off to a preparatory at Brighton–never knew an aunt yet who didn’t want to send you to a preparatory at Brighton!–and she’ll do the same to me, only she’ll choose a beastly inferior place, where I shall be looked after by some woman,’ concluded Christopher, in a tone of scorn. Then he caught sight of Barbara, who was still standing thoughtfully in the middle of the room; and he shook his head at her pityingly. ‘After that, having cleared the house of boys, she’ll turn her attention to the Babe,’ he said, and paused rather abruptly.

Barbara woke up from her reflections with a start. ‘Yes, Kit?’ she said questioningly. ‘What will Auntie Anna do to me?’

Kit’s expression of pity became exaggerated. ‘To begin with,’ he said, with a deep sigh, ‘she’ll let down your frocks, and tie back your hair, and never let you go anywhere alone, not even to the pillar-box at the corner!’

The other boys began to laugh afresh.

‘Think of the Babe with her hair bunched up on the top, and fastened with a bit of ribbon! She’ll look exactly like a French poodle, won’t she?’ scoffed Peter.

‘She’ll have to hold up her skirt in the street, and step in and out of the puddles like this!’ added Wilfred, taking the end of his coat between his thumb and finger, and prancing round Barbara on tiptoe.

Egbert shut up his book, and joined lazily in the general derision. ‘Poor little Babe! will it have to turn into a young lady, and stop talking slang, and learn about box-pleats and false hems and tucks?’ he jeered softly.

Barbara turned her back on the others, and once more appealed to Christopher. Teasing was not the kind of thing that roused her; she had grown accustomed to it, long ago. ‘What else, Kit?’ she demanded impatiently. ‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’

Christopher nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said ominously, ‘there’s something else. But I’m not going to tell you what it is.’

‘Yes,’ said Egbert, stretching himself, ‘of course there’s something else, Babe. We all know what it is, but we’re not going to tell you either.’

Babs looked swiftly from one to the other. ‘I know!’ she said, shaking the hair out of her eyes. ‘It’s–school!’

Kit nodded again. ‘That swagger place near Crofts, where the adopted kid has been,’ he continued in a solemn tone.

The others copied his manner, and looked at her with a ridiculous pretence of concern. ‘Poor Babe!’ they said in a chorus.

Barbara again shook the hair out of her eyes with a defiant gesture. Then she spun round lightly on her toes, and surprised everybody by laughing scornfully. ‘What a fuss you’re all making!’ she cried. ‘Don’t you know I am simply longing to go to school?’

Judging from their expressions, the Berkeley boys certainly did not know anything of the kind. Even Christopher was puzzled at her curious way of taking his prediction. ‘You’re putting it on, Babs!’ he said doubtfully.

Barbara stopped spinning round, and faced them all breathlessly. ‘I’m not, honour bright!’ she declared. ‘I have always wanted to go to school; I have always longed to have some real friends of my own, and to be with people who are not trying all the time to be funny. You don’t know how tiring it is to be scored off from morning till night. I want a change; I want to do regular, proper lessons, and to get to the top of the school, and to have every one looking up to me! Then, they play games at school, real games, instead of the stupid ones we play in the square, that only graze your knees. Girls are nice and jolly and quiet, and they understand you, and they don’t bother you to do things when you’d sooner read. Of course I want to go to school, dreadfully!’

She paused for breath, and Egbert whistled. ‘Well, I’m bothered!’ he remarked. He had never pretended to understand his little sister, but he could not help being astonished at this totally new side to her character. Peter took refuge as usual in a laugh; and Wilfred stared silently. But Kit looked more solemn than ever.

‘I’m disappointed in you, Babs,’ he said. ‘I should never have thought that you wanted to be a young lady, never!’

‘But I don’t, Kit!’ answered the child in a troubled tone. ‘I want to do something new, that’s all. I–I’m sure father will understand what I mean, if he sends me to school,’ she added, with something that sounded like a shake in her voice.

‘Ah–father!’ replied Christopher, gruffly. ‘Father will not be here, you see.’

A sudden silence came over them; and Barbara turned to the window and flattened her nose against the glass pane, and blinked her eyes with all her might. There was nothing to be seen outside but the blank wall that usually limits the view from the back of a London house; but the child with the untidy brown hair, and the small impish face, and the slender long legs, was able, for all that, to see pictures out there. She always saw pictures when she was excited about anything; and just now she was thrilled with a new dream–a dream of the place that her imagination named ‘school.’ She had always hidden from the boys how much she wanted to go to school; and it was only this afternoon, when their derision provoked her into it, that she had let them have a guess at her real feelings. They had not understood her a bit, as she knew they would not; but that did not matter. Her father would understand, though she never told him much, either, and he had to guess for himself what went on in the quaint little mind of his only daughter; but then, Barbara had a shrewd idea that he always guessed right, and that came to the same thing, really. Just as she was comforting herself with this assurance, the miserable consciousness returned that he was going away, and she would be left at the mercy of a strange aunt; and she found herself staring at nothing but a dismal brick wall, with eyes that were blinking to keep back the tears.

Peter was the first to break the pause that had settled with a kind of gloom on the old London schoolroom. He was always on the alert to resent anything that cast a shadow over the light gaiety of existence.‘I say, look here,’ he began, giving himself a shake as if to get rid of an unpleasant impression; ‘don’t be so jolly blue, all of you! Father will only be away six months; he said so himself. And as for Auntie Anna, how do we know she isn’t quite a decent old lady? Some old ladies are awfully sporting. Do you remember Merton major’s aunt, Will? She used to give him whopping tips, whenever she came to see him; and he said he quite liked her!’

Christopher persisted in his gloomy view of the situation. ‘Our aunt is not the same as anybody else’s aunt,’ he said. ‘And then, there’s the adopted kid.’

‘Yes,’ admitted Peter, ‘no doubt she’ll be a trial. Five years at a girls’ school and a year abroad doesn’t give anybody a chance, does it?’

‘Oh!’ said Barbara, in a disappointed tone, ‘I did hope she would be nice!’

‘Wonder if she’ll mind the smell of chemicals,’ observed Wilfred, sniffing cautiously at the saucepan he still held in his hand.

‘Of course she will,’ answered Christopher. ‘She’ll hate the whole jolly lot of us, because we’re boys; and she’ll disapprove of the Babe.’

The boys broke into a laugh. There was something irresistibly funny to them in Christopher’s serious way of looking at things. But Barbara was much too worried over his last remark to join in the laugh against him.

‘Kit,’ she begged anxiously, ‘why is the adopted kid going to disapprove of me?’

The air was full of startling discoveries this afternoon, and the idea that the ‘adopted kid,’ for whom she had already formed an imaginary attachment, was not going to like her, was a great shock to her. But before Kit had time to speak, a loud ring at the door-bell drove the words out of his mind and startled the rest of them into an agitated expectancy.

‘That’s her!’ groaned Kit, and he dropped on the sofa and plunged his head into the cushion, as if he wanted to stifle even the thought of the dragon who was coming to work such havoc in the family. His words were proved by the sudden arrival of Robin, who had been posted as scout on the back staircase, and who now flung himself into their midst. He was in far too great a hurry to look where he was going; and he tripped over the saucepan, which had been set down casually near the door, and fell full length into the room.

‘Heigh-ho, Bobbin!’ said Peter, cheerily, as he picked him up again; for, in spite of his nine years, there was always the chance that Robin might be going to cry. But, on this occasion, Robin was too full of news to trouble himself about possible bruises.

‘She’s come; I’ve seen her!’ he gasped. ‘There’s a carriage an’ pair, big spanking chestnuts with red rosettes; and a man–a man with pink tops to his boots and a brush at the side of his hat––’

‘Get on, Bobbin!’ urged Egbert, impatiently. ‘We’ve all seen a carriage and pair before. What about the dragon?’‘Saw her too!’ said Robin, panting for breath. ‘Got a long black silk thing on, and a bonnet that’s rather like a hat, with pink feathers in it, and a walking-stick with a blue knob to it, an’ white kid gloves,–no, I mean grey kid––’

‘Oh, get on, do!’ interrupted Egbert again. ‘Never mind about her clothes, stupid! What is she like?’

‘Don’t know what she’s like,’ said Robin, a little sulkily. ‘Couldn’t see everything from the back staircase, could I? There was a girl with her,’ he added, as a concession to the general curiosity.

‘The adopted kid!’ exclaimed the others in a chorus.

Babs pressed forward eagerly. ‘Does she look nice, Bobbin? Is she tall or short? Are her dresses quite long, and is her hair done up?’ she cried, pouring out her questions in a jumble.

‘Oh, yes; her skirts trail all along the ground for miles,’ answered Robin. ‘And she sort of rustled like tissue paper. Didn’t see her face, ’cause it was all tied up in a veil,–but she’s awfully tall,’ he added, looking round the circle with his head poised on one side. ‘She’s taller’n any of us–even Egbert,’ he concluded viciously, remembering his recent snubbing.

Egbert put out a long arm, laid the boy dexterously on the flat of his back in the middle of the floor, and pinned him there with his foot. ‘Say that’s a cram!’ he commanded in a stern voice. ‘Say I’m a head taller than the adopted kid, or else I’ll––’

What he would have done to him remained unheard, for Robin set up a wail that completely drowned the end of his sentence. The other boys only shrugged their shoulders; the thing seemed to them a necessary incident in the education of a younger member, and they were not going to interfere. But Barbara sprang forward passionately. That was the kind of thing that did rouse her.

‘Leave him alone, Egbert!’ she cried, but she did not wait to see whether he would. She scarcely supposed that he would stop teasing any one for her; besides, she never stayed to think, when once anything had roused her. So she put her head down and made a charge straight at the offender; and Egbert, being unprepared for the attack, fell backwards over the footstool, with his small sister on the top of him, while Robin wriggled free of them both and set up a louder howl than before in his surprise and dismay.

In the middle of the hubbub the door opened; and a voice, that attracted their attention at once because it was strange to them, made itself heard through the tumult.

‘Is there anybody here who is called Babs?’ asked the new-comer.