Once more, Kit stood with his back to the fireplace, and prepared to address the family. It was just half an hour after Mr. Berkeley had left, and they were all assembled rather sorrowfully in the old schoolroom. In another ten minutes their own cabs would be at the door, and they too would be on their way to a new life. Altogether, it was a solemn moment, and the genius of the family could not resist the temptation to make a speech.

‘Boys,’ he began, nodding his head with mock importance, ‘it is my opinion that Auntie Anna is a jolly wise old lady!’

‘What’s that to do with father going away?’ asked Barbara, rubbing her eyes furiously. She had had her cry on the back staircase, and she felt safe for the moment against a further display of weakness.

‘It’s got a lot to do with it,’ rejoined Kit. ‘Didn’t she take us all to the pantomime, last night–father, too? I suppose you think that was just to amuse herself, don’t you? Well, it wasn’t. It was because she was afraid of our sitting together at home, and saying it was father’s last evening, and–blubbing.’

This he said severely, looking at the weaker members, Babs and Robin, as he spoke. They bore the test heroically, and the orator went on.

‘And why,’ he inquired, ‘did she give us only a week to pack up, and buy clothes and things, when there’s ten days more before you other chaps go back? Of course there’s the Babe’s school, but that could have waited. Girls’ schools never matter.’

‘Well, why, most precocious of kids?’ asked Egbert, with lazy tolerance. Certainly, no one but Christopher would have been allowed to say so much uninterrupted. But then, even Egbert had a kind of secret admiration for his clever young brother, though he did not pretend to understand him.

‘Well,’ continued Christopher, ‘if we’d had more time to think about it, we might not have been so keen on going to live in another person’s house. And, naturally, Auntie Anna didn’t want any ructions over it.’

‘Oh, stop it, Kit! What a lot of rot you are making up!’ objected Peter, impatiently. Of the three elder boys, he was nearest in age to Kit, and was consequently less inclined to tolerate him.

‘Everything points to it, if you’re not too thick-headed to see,’ retorted Kit, crushingly. ‘Look at the way we’re being rushed out of the house, directly father has turned his back. Isn’t that to give us something to think about, so that we shouldn’t mope about the shop, and fancy ourselves? Of course,’ he added blandly, fixing his spectacles on his nose and staring at Peter, ‘some people don’t need anything to set them grinning again.’

‘Christopher, my son, you are a clever child, but your impudence simply isn’t to be borne,’ said Peter; and he stooped down and lifted the fragile figure of the orator high in the air, and set him down lightly outside the door. Kit rearranged his tie, put his spectacles straight, and peered up at the unappreciative listener who towered above him.

‘As I was saying,’ he resumed gently, ‘Auntie Anna can give us all points when it comes to being ’cute.’

The next day or two proved the truth of what, in his shrewd way, he had already guessed for himself. Yet the Berkeleys were hardly to be called unfeeling, because they appeared to take their father’s departure so coolly; for it would have been difficult to remain unhappy long, when there were so many delightful things to distract them. Besides their excitement, town-bred as they were, at finding themselves in a real country-house, with an oak staircase, a secret room, and a ghost story, there were separate joys waiting for each one of them as well. There was a horse for Egbert to ride to hounds, and a well-stocked library for Christopher to bury himself in, and a lumber-room for Wilfred to turn into a laboratory; while Peter was allowed, the very first day, to go out shooting with the keepers, and Robin promptly became the pet of all the men on the estate, and spent long, happy hours with them down at the stables and the farm. If there was any one in the family who was not perfectly content, it was Barbara.

No doubt, she would have been quite as absorbed as the others were in their new home, if she had not been going to another one herself the very next day. As it was, she found it a little difficult to share their enthusiasm since she had a private enthusiasm of her own. But the boys did not understand this at all. They were very affectionate to her in their rough, undemonstrative way, and they were always telling her that she would be sure to ‘pull through all right’; for they naturally supposed that she wanted the kind of pity they wanted so much themselves at the stated, horrible periods when they went back to school. But as to grasping her notion that she was going to enjoy life at Wootton Beeches, that was not to be expected of them. So Barbara felt that her interests, for the first time in her life, were not the same as theirs; and a queer sort of feeling crept over her, that changes–even nice, interesting changes–occasionally had something strange and uncomfortable about them. She grew so perplexed over it, at last, that she even went to Jill for sympathy. Jill was at least a girl, and Jill had been to school, in the same delightful place to which she was going on the morrow; and Jill at least ought to know whether the boys’ idea of school was right or wrong. So, just after tea, on her last evening at Crofts, the child swallowed her natural distrust of her cousin, which, after all, had arisen chiefly from their mutual shyness of each other, and started in search of her.

Jill was in the conservatory, arranging the flowers for the dinner-table; and Barbara’s shyness returned, as the trim, neat figure came walking towards her, along the rows of chrysanthemums. She glanced down at her crumpled pinafore and sighed desperately. Being dragged up a dusty ladder into a cobwebby lumber-room by Wilfred had not proved the best of treatments for a pinafore that really had been clean a couple of hours ago. But Jill suddenly came out in a new light. With no teasing schoolboys to overhear her, she felt that here, at last, was a chance of making friends with her odd little tomboy of a cousin.

‘Have you come to help me with the flowers?’ she asked, with such a friendly smile, that Babs cheered up at once. She forgot all about her crumpled pinafore, and went straight to the point.

‘No, I didn’t come for that,’ she answered simply. ‘I came to ask you about–about school.’

‘Ah!’ said Jill, suddenly picking chrysanthemums at a great rate. ‘Supposing you tell me what you think about it yourself?’

Her mother’s words were running in her head: ‘Do your best to understand the poor little soul!’ and Jill wondered what she could tell her that would not upset her notions of school too cruelly.

‘Oh, well,’ replied Babs, ‘of course, I think it’s going to be beautiful; but the boys–the boys are so funny about it, and it’s made me all in a muddle inside. Do you think the boys know?’

‘Perhaps not,’ said Jill, and she strolled away along the rows of chrysanthemums. It seemed a shame to spoil the child’s illusion; and yet, when she thought of this quaint little untrained object being dropped in the middle of the girls at Wootton Beeches––

Barbara had followed her up closely, and she suddenly interrupted her reflections. ‘You know what a girls’ school is like, don’t you, Jill?’ she continued appealingly. ‘I wish–I do wish you would tell the boys they are all wrong about it. They are wrong, aren’t they?’

There was a suspicion of a doubt in the last words that struck Jill as being rather pathetic. She put her bunch of chrysanthemums down, and drew Barbara towards her. ‘You see, Babs, it is like this,’ she said slowly; ‘school is very nice, if you do not mind things being strange at first, and if you can bear being laughed at, and––’

‘Why, that is quite easy!’ interrupted Babs, with a smile. ‘The boys have teased me always.’

‘Yes,’ said Jill, doubtfully; ‘the boys have teased you; but that is not quite the same thing. Girls–girls are not boys, you see.’

‘Oh no, I know they’re not!’ replied Barbara, happily. ‘Girls are quiet and kind and gentle; and they always understand you, and they are ready to make friends directly they see you. I think I know what girls are like.’

She was thinking of the princesses in her fairy kingdom; and another little smile flickered across her face. Jill glanced at her for a moment, and then suddenly made up her mind how to act.

‘Look here, Babs,’ she began, smoothing the mop of tangled hair with her hands; ‘you go on thinking that girls are like that, and you’ll get along all right!’ Barbara wriggled away from her before she had time to say any more, gave her a swift look and a smile of gratitude, and darted off in search of the boys. ‘They’ll be very stupid if they don’t see what a babe it is,’ added Jill to herself.

At the door of the conservatory, however, the small figure in the crumpled pinafore came to a sudden standstill.

‘I say, Jill,’ the child blurted out, and she clutched a handful of pinafore to give herself courage; ‘I–I want to tell you something.’

‘Do you?’ said Jill, smiling.

‘I want to explain that I hated you at first, because I thought you were going to make the boys like you better than me,’ Babs went on breathlessly. ‘And you frightened me too, because you laughed in such a funny way, just as if you were sneering at me for being in a muck. I thought, perhaps, it was because you were so grand, and your clothes were so grand, and all that; but I couldn’t help being in a muck, because I always am in a muck, you see; and so, you see–you see––’

‘Look here Babs,’ she began, smoothing the mop of tangled hair