The Youngest Girl in the School Part 28

'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 compa.s.s 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 compa.s.ses 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 n.o.body 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 pa.s.sed me in a white ap.r.o.n, 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 pa.s.sed 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?'