CHAPTER XVI

THE LAST DAY OF THE TERM

In the annals of Wootton Beeches there had never been so dismal a packing-day as the one that dawned on the morrow of the gymnastic competition. Generally, packing-day was the most delightful day in the term: it came just after the break-up party, and just before going home, and everything that happened on it seemed filled with a peculiar interest of its own. First of all, there was the joy of rushing up to the bedrooms directly after breakfast, to put out all the clothes in tidy little heaps, ready for packing later on; then, the less delightful business of clearing the bookshelves and tearing up the old exercise-books--an occupation which contrived, in spite of itself, to present a certain amount of charm, simply because it belonged to the last day of the term. And the nicest part of all was the indescribable feeling that it was the last day of the term, that there were no more lessons to prepare and no more penalties to avoid, no more scales to practise and no more stockings to mend, and, best of all, no more rules to bother about, so that Fräulein and Mademoiselle could both be addressed, much to their own distraction, in the British tongue, and anybody who pleased could run up and down stairs to her heart's content without asking leave first. All these privileges made packing-day, as a rule, something to look forward to. But to-day nothing was happening as it usually did.

Breakfast had been gone through almost in silence, and the accustomed rush to the bedrooms afterwards had taken place quite quietly and tamely. The tidying of the bookshelves, which could generally be made to linger so pleasantly over the whole morning, was accomplished for once in an hour or so; and the girls found themselves, at eleven o'clock, with nothing further to do until Miss Tomlinson should send for them to pack their things. On any other packing-day the playroom would have been cleared of chairs and tables in a few minutes, and somebody would have been dragged to the piano to play a valse, and there would have been plenty of amusement for every one until dinner-time. But to-day nobody wanted to dance, and hardly any one talked.

Jean Murray sat motionless on one of the window-seats in the senior playroom. On packing-day all ordinary restrictions were suspended, and the younger children wandered in and out of the two rooms as they pleased. Jean had taken advantage of this privilege to escape from her usual play-fellows, who were remaining behind from force of habit in their own domain. The way Angela persisted in crying was enough to drive any one away; she had cried all through prayers, and had begun again directly after breakfast. Mary Wells, forgetting how much she had endured on former occasions from the triumvirate, sat with her arm round Angela's neck, calling her 'Poor darling!' at intervals, with an occasional sob of her own to keep her company. Some of the others cried a little too,--at least, they did when they came near Angela,--and Charlotte Bigley was in such a temper that no one dared speak to her. All together, the juniors' room was more than Jean could bear just then. Jean was not crying herself: she had not cried a drop since she saw the streak of scarlet twist round in the air and drop with a thud that still sounded in her ears.

It was not a bit like the last day of the term. 'Tommy' did not once come to the door and call out the name of the next girl who was to go upstairs and pack. Nobody in the room was exchanging addresses with any one else, or promising to write weekly letters during the holidays. Margaret was as cross as Charlotte Bigley, it seemed, for she allowed no one but Ruth Oliver to come near her; and the other big girls were scattered about the room in idle, listless groups, conversing a little, now and then, in hushed tones. None of them noticed Jean; and Jean never saw them. She just sat rigidly on the window-seat, and looked straight in front of her, with the odd, hard expression on her face that had been there since the night before.

Margaret was sitting at the table tracing interminable circles on the back of an old envelope with a pair of compasses. The presence of Ruth at her elbow, as she absorbed herself in this pursuit, was very comforting. Ruth was a slow old thing, as every one knew, but in time of need she was invaluable.

After a while, the head girl dug the point of the compass into the table, and cleared her throat nervously.

'She's such an awfully nice little kid,' she said. She spoke hurriedly, and her face had turned rather red.

'Yes,' answered Ruth, staring down at the maze of circles on the back of the envelope.

Margaret went on, with an effort: 'She has such a queer way of getting at you,' she said. 'I never knew how much I cared about the child, till--till now.'

'No,' answered Ruth, softly.

'Supposing----' began Margaret, and stopped abruptly. 'Do you think----?' she began again, and again hesitated.

'Hurly-Burly said they couldn't tell till the Doctor's next visit,' replied Ruth. 'She hadn't recovered consciousness when he left, you see.'

'Don't!' muttered Margaret, hastily. She dug the compass a little deeper, and cleared her throat once more. 'When did you see Hurly-Burly?' she asked.

'Just after prayers,' said Ruth. 'She said I wasn't to tell the younger ones, so don't split. The Doctor stayed till five this morning, and he's coming again presently. He's rather cut up, she says.'

'_That_ Doctor? Don't believe it!' said Margaret, shading some of the circles with a pencil.

'Hurly-Burly said so,' maintained Ruth, in her resolute way. 'Perhaps he isn't so stiff and stupid as he seems. I saw him last night, talking to Jill Urquhart, and he looked quite young and jolly. You never know, do you?'

'Perhaps not. It doesn't matter, does it?' said the head girl, indifferently.

'Hurly-Burly is pretty bad, too,' continued Ruth. 'She thinks it's her fault, because there was a gap in the mattresses, so that the Babe fell half on the boards. That's how she cut her head. You see, the mattresses were arranged for the rings, and when Hurly-Burly altered them for the trapeze she didn't stop to test them to see if they were in the right place. Anybody else might have done the same, with the whole room waiting for her; but still, she is reproaching herself like anything.'

'She needn't,' said Margaret, with quiet vehemence. 'It's only the fault of that idiot Scales.'

'Poor Scales!' murmured Ruth. 'I saw him too wandering about the hall; and he was crying just like a baby, and he didn't seem to mind my seeing him a bit. I suppose foreigners are always like that.'

Margaret curled her lip contemptuously. 'I shouldn't waste my pity on him, if I were you,' she remarked. 'No one but a foreigner would have anything to cry about.'

Ruth glanced at her timidly. 'I think, perhaps, it is worse for Scales than any one,' she ventured to say. 'Of course, he's a hopeless idiot, but he didn't mean----'

'Oh, never mind about Scales!' interrupted Margaret; and Ruth took up the compasses and began drawing invisible circles on the tablecloth.

A bit of conversation drifted across to them from the juniors' room.

'Her brothers stopped all night; so did the old lady,' Mary Wells was saying. 'I saw their breakfast going into Finny's study this morning, when Tommy called me back into the dining-room to fold my table-napkin.'

'How could you notice a thing like that?' came in plaintive, reproving tones from Angela. 'I wish I was able to bear up like you, Mary.'

'Poor darling!' said Mary Wells, tenderly.

'Was Jill there too?' asked another voice.

'She's up in Finny's bedroom, with _her_,' answered Angela, quickly. She was almost restored to a normal condition by the desire to tell something that nobody else knew. Then she remembered herself, and subsided into a proper state of tearfulness. 'I was hanging about upstairs, to see if I could find out how _she_ was, when Jill passed me in a white apron, looking just like a real nurse,' she went on, with a long-drawn sigh. 'I tried to speak to her, but I was too upset.'

'_Poor_ darling!' cried Mary Wells, more fervently than before.

Margaret stirred impatiently, and flung down her pencil. 'I say,' she said to Ruth, 'what can we give those children to do? I'm sure Finny wouldn't like them to go on drivelling like that. Angela is such a little idiot!'

'I think she's really fond of the Babe,' observed Ruth, as she followed the head girl across the room.

'Oh, yes,' admitted Margaret, with a shrug of her shoulders; 'Jean told her she'd got to be.'

At the window-seat she stopped and forgot Angela for the moment. The sight of the child who sat there, looking so white and wretched, touched her.

'Cheer up, kiddie!' she said, sitting down beside her. Ruth Oliver discreetly moved on.

'Get away!' gasped Jean.

Margaret stroked her hand, but Jean drew it away sharply, and shifted her position so that she looked out of the window. Her eyes wandered across the drive and fell on the little building in the field, where she and Angela had passed their eight days of quarantine with the youngest girl in the school. Somehow, Jean could not bear the sight of it to-day, and she moved round restively, till she faced Margaret again.

'Oh, do leave me alone!' she said fiercely; and the head girl felt rather helpless, and left her.

In the junior playroom, Angela had relapsed at the sight of Ruth Oliver into a fresh fit of crying.

'What _is_ the matter, Angela?' demanded Ruth, for once almost losing her patience.

'Matter?' sobbed Angela, leaning back for support on the substantial arm of Mary Wells. 'I'm full of re--remorse, and--and penitence! So would you be, if--if you were as bad and--and as sinful as me!'

'Why, what have you been doing now?' inquired Ruth, keeping her temper with difficulty.

Angela stuffed her handkerchief into her mouth, and recovered sufficient control over herself to take it out again and make her confession.

'Last week,' she faltered, '_she_ asked me to help her with her French; and--and--I was cross, and--and--I wouldn't.'

She burst into tears again, as Charlotte Bigley looked up from the book she was pretending to read and put in a curt remark.

'Who's _she_?' she demanded bluntly.

Angela stopped crying to stare at her. 'You know fast enough, Charlotte!' she mumbled indistinctly.

Charlotte tossed her head scornfully. 'If you mean Barbara Berkeley, why on earth can't you say so?' she exclaimed. 'She hasn't lost her name because she fell off the rings, _has_ she?'

Mary Wells spoke her mind solemnly. 'We all know _you_ have no feeling, Charlotte Bigley,' she was beginning, when some one near the window announced that the Doctor had just driven round the corner of the house.

This in itself was enough to reduce Angela to further depths of contrition. 'What shall I do,' she wailed, 'if she dies before I can ask her forgiveness?'

Margaret Hulme suddenly stood over her, and shook her by the shoulder.

'Stop it, child!' she said, not unkindly, for even Angela's tears made her own feel uncomfortably near the surface. She turned to the others quickly.

'Every one will get ready and go into the field for a hockey practice,' she commanded.

Charlotte shut her book with a bang. 'What's the good of hockey?' she grumbled crossly.

'What's the good of anything,' sighed Margaret, 'with that poor little kid lying ill up there?'

Charlotte looked at her swiftly, and then turned away, blinking her eyes furiously; and the head girl took her arm with astonishing condescension, and walked silently into the cloakroom with her.

A little later, Dr. Hurst came out of Miss Finlayson's bedroom upstairs, and closed the door softly behind him. The head-mistress stood waiting for him on the landing. Their eyes met, and hers were full of anxious inquiry. In his there shone a gleam of something that had not been there before.

'Better,' he said, and drew a long breath. He put his hand on the baluster-rail to steady himself. 'She'll do, now that consciousness has returned,' he went on in a businesslike tone; 'the concussion was only slight, after all, and the fracture to the leg could hardly be in a better place. Wonderful what children will do to kill themselves without succeeding! She'll pull through in no time, with rest and quiet--perfect quiet, mind! Don't let those boys go near her, whatever you do; and keep your girls from weeping on her neck as much as possible. Good morning.'

Miss Finlayson smiled, and retained his hand a moment. No one would have thought that this practical man of medicine, who pretended to regard his little patient merely as an interesting case, was the boyish-hearted fellow who had sat by her bedside all night to watch for her returning consciousness.

'Must you go?' she said. 'Why not rest on the sofa in my study for an hour, and stay to lunch with us? You must be worn out.'

The Doctor drew himself up and frowned. 'Not at all, not at all!' he said, looking vexed. 'Room full of patients waiting for me at home--I must wish you good morning.'

[Illustration: 'Tell me, Herr Doktor, haf I kilt her?']

He left her and hurried off, still frowning. Just as he turned the corner of the gallery, Egbert and Peter, who had been lying in wait for him some fifteen minutes, sprang out upon him from an open door.

'How is she?' they asked eagerly.

'Really!' fumed the Doctor, who hated being taken by surprise. 'The bulletin is with Miss Finlayson; I have no time----'

Peter grasped his arm as he was escaping. 'Is she going to get better?' he implored. There was no mistaking the earnestness in the boy's face, and the Doctor melted in spite of himself.

'Yes, yes, to be sure,' he growled. 'That is, if you leave her alone.'

When he reached the staircase he was again brought to a standstill. The way was entirely blocked by the massive form of the German music-master, who sat on the top stair with his face buried in his large, fat hands. The Doctor tapped his foot on the ground impatiently. If one thing more than another annoyed him, it was the sight of uncontrolled emotion.

'Pardon me,' he said briskly, 'but will you kindly----'

'_Gott in Himmel!_' shouted Herr Scales, springing to his feet as he recognised the Doctor's voice. 'Tell me, Herr Doktor, haf I kilt her? Am I a murterer of the _lieblichste_ little Fräulein that ever walked upon----'

'Nonsense, sir!' interrupted Dr. Hurst, doing his best to keep his temper. The sight of the tears that streamed down the good-natured face of the music-master was enough, he told himself, to annoy any man who was not a foreigner. 'Nobody has killed her yet; but what you are going to do, among you, before you have done with her, I shouldn't like to say.'

'You do not understand,' wept Herr Scales, clasping his hands. 'It was I who nearly kilt her, _dummer_ wretch that I am.'

'Well, you haven't killed her, my good sir, and she's going to get better,' answered the Doctor, trying to deal gently with him in spite of his irritating foreign behaviour. Then he left him and went quickly down the stairs.

Two more voices assailed him in the hall, as he took down his coat from the peg. Restraining his impatience as best he might, the young man looked round to find Kit and Wilfred at his elbow. Curled up on the rug in front of the stove lay Robin, fast asleep, with his head pillowed on a footstool. Weariness and the shedding of many tears had left their mark on his round, babyish face, and the elder boys looked little more than half-awake themselves. Kit's face was tear-stained too, and he suddenly found he could not put the question he was longing to ask. It was Wilfred who blurted it out instead.

'Is she better?' he asked.

The Doctor had been up all night; he had gone through more anxiety than he could have believed himself capable of feeling; he had found that his heart had gone out unconsciously, eleven weeks ago, to the child who had called him a beast; and he felt that all the glory his profession could bring him was not worth so much as the saving of that one little life upstairs. And then people came and bothered him with their senseless questions. If she were worse, was it likely he would be leaving her now?

He was worn out with want of sleep, and it did not occur to him that the same thing might possibly be true of the white-faced lads before him.

'Bless my soul!' he exclaimed testily. 'How many _are_ there of you? There's a couple at every corner. How can you expect your sister to get better if you hang about the place and ask questions at the top of your voice? There's--there's an atmosphere of nervous sentiment all over the house that's enough to ruin any case.'

Wilfred was dumbfounded, and stared stupidly. But Christopher suddenly found his tongue, and, being Christopher, he found it sarcastically.

'Counting Jill, there are only six all together,' he said, peering up at the irritated young man through his spectacles, 'so you won't meet any more.'

'I don't care how many there are of you,' grumbled Dr. Hurst, flinging on his coat. 'Keep out of her way, that's all--and mine too.'

'You may be sure we'll do that, if we can,' retorted Wilfred, recovering his courage. 'Only, you haven't told us yet how she is.'

'You seem to forget she's our sister, and we're beastly cut up about her,' added Kit, glumly.

'She's not a rotten bacteria, either,' said Wilfred, in a vicious undertone which the Doctor fortunately missed.

Dr. Hurst felt a little bit ashamed of himself, and was more cross than ever. 'There, there! She's better, of course,' he muttered, pushing past his questioners. Then he saw the sleeping Robin curled up in front of the stove, and he glanced back at the tired faces of the other two. 'Best thing you can do is to go straight to bed,' he advised, jamming his hat down on his head. 'Best thing for the case, too.'

Kit smiled at him indulgently. 'Let them go to bed who have beds,' he remarked. 'I've only got an arm-chair.'

The Doctor fled discomfited, and shut the front door in their faces. He did not understand boys, and he did not like them, and he would not have minded if he had never had to meet another boy as long as he lived. In a very few moments, however, he came to the conclusion that although boys were pretty bad, girls could beat them easily, with several points to spare.

His man was walking the cob up and down outside, and the trap was not in sight when Dr. Hurst shut the front door behind him. The occurrence was

## particularly unfortunate, for as he stood waiting on the steps the whole

of the junior hockey team came strolling round the corner of the house. This in itself was sufficiently embarrassing to the young man who stood there; and he hailed the appearance of his trap with deep and earnest satisfaction. But he was not to be allowed to escape so easily. The sound of wheels made the children look round; and some one suddenly called out--'It's the Doctor!' The next moment he found himself, greatly to his consternation, in the middle of a throng of excited young ladies, all in extremely short skirts and all armed with hockey clubs, who were clamouring loudly and persistently to know if Barbara Berkeley was out of danger.

Probably it would never have happened if it had not been the last day of the term, when a sense of unusual liberty prevailed. Certainly, if it had been any other day the hockey team would not have been wandering round by the front door at all, but would have gone straight to the nine-acre field through the orchard at the back. But the Doctor knew nothing of all this. He only realised that the girls were finishing what the boys had begun, and that in another minute he should lose his temper very badly indeed.

Most eager of all was a child with a freckled face and reddish-coloured hair, who somehow seemed familiar to him, though he could not remember where he had met her before. She came right up to where he stood helplessly, with his right foot placed on the carriage-step; and she raised her voice shrilly above all the others.

'May I see her before she gets worse?' she implored sentimentally. 'I should never forgive myself, Mary Wells says I shouldn't, if anything happened to her, and----'

The Doctor made a great effort and waved them off distractedly, just as Margaret Hulme and some of the elder ones hurried on the scene and called angrily to his tormentors. He seized the opportunity to spring to his seat, and then turned and glared at them.

'See her before she gets worse?' he answered back furiously. 'If you want to see her before you've done your best to finish her altogether, you'll have to look sharp.'

Miss Finlayson suddenly appeared on the doorstep. Nobody knew how much she had seen or heard, but she was looking exceedingly stern. She opened her mouth to speak, just as Dr. Hurst perceived her and broke into a fresh torrent of words. By this time he had lost the last scrap of his patience.

'What with rascally boys and hysterical _schoolgirls_,' he shouted, seizing the whip and cracking it round his head, 'how can you expect me to pull the case through?'

He tugged violently at the reins; the startled animal sprang forward, and the trap clattered noisily out of sight.

The few short, vigorous sentences with which Miss Finlayson improved the next five minutes sent the girls into the hockey field with a much reduced opinion of themselves. Margaret Hulme stayed behind to vindicate the offenders as well as she could; and the result was that the head-mistress remembered it was the last day of the term, and blamed herself for having almost allowed her feelings for the youngest girl in school to run away with her.

'Send Jean and Angela up to my bedroom at once,' she said thoughtfully, when Margaret had finished telling her what had been going on in the playroom that morning.

She waited for them on the landing, and kissed them both very affectionately when they appeared hand in hand. She glanced quickly from Angela's red and swollen countenance to Jean's pale and miserable one, and she decided not to say what had been in her mind the minute before. A much better idea struck her, and she acted upon it promptly.

'If you will promise me to be as quiet as mice,' she whispered, 'you shall both have one peep at her.'

The room into which she led them on tiptoe was almost dark. The only light that was admitted came from one small window in the farther corner, and it was just enough to reveal Jill, as she bent over the bed with a cup in her hand. Then she moved away, and the two children, peeping from their hiding-place behind the screen by the door, saw Barbara.

She lay flat on her back among the white pillows; a hillock under the bedclothes showed where the cage protected her broken leg, and a bandage round her head kept the thick, dark hair from tumbling over her face as it usually did. Otherwise, she was not nearly so much altered as her play-fellows had vaguely expected to find her. The bright little eyes gleamed out as impishly as ever from beneath the white bandage, and as she smiled up at Jill they realised to their intense relief that the Babe, with a hole in her head and a cage over her leg, was much the same Babe who had arrived in their midst, with her elf-like look and her happy unconscious smile, three months ago.

'Why, Jean, I do believe you're crying,' said Angela, in surprise, when Miss Finlayson had pushed them outside again, and they were retreating slowly along the gallery. Angela herself felt no further inclination to cry, now that she had seen the Babe and found she was not a bit altered. There was no middle course in Angela's emotions, and her only wonder now was why any one had made a fuss about Barbara's accident at all.

But the tears were raining down Jean's cheeks for the first time, and the hard, queer look was gone from her face. She flung herself away to her own room, and left Angela to puzzle over her behaviour as best she might.

##