'You are revealing all the secrets of the prison-house, little girl,' he remarked.

Barbara looked from one to the other. 'Auntie Anna did ask me,' she said reproachfully.

'To be sure I did,' answered the old lady, recovering herself with an effort, 'and I am delighted to hear some of the things I am expected to do. But you must allow that even a fairy G.o.dmother has a hard time of it occasionally, and it is a little difficult to provide for all her G.o.dchildren at once, you know. However, you shall hear what is going to happen in a week's time, on the very day that this naughty father of yours takes himself off to America; and if you approve of it, we can see about the other things later on. Is that a bargain, eh?'

'Oh! What else is going to happen in a week's time?' asked Barbara, eagerly. By this time she was prepared for any dream to come true. Her faith in the old lady who was playing at fairy stories was complete.

Mr. Berkeley answered her. 'Auntie Anna is going to carry you all off to Crofts for the whole six months that I am away,' he told her; 'and you are going to Jill's school at Wootton Beeches, which is only ten miles off.

So Kit and Robin will be able to come over and see you sometimes, when the others have gone away, for they are going to have a tutor and stay at Crofts with Auntie Anna and Jill. Isn't that a fine idea?'

Barbara was speechless with rapture. The expression on her face made them laugh once more. Then she gave a kind of war-whoop that might have been heard in the schoolroom, and bounded again towards the door. 'I simply can't bear it another minute,' she gasped. 'I _must_ go and tell the boys.'

'Bear it just one more minute, and hear what else I have to say,' begged Auntie Anna, raising herself with the help of her stick, and walking slowly after her excited little niece. 'Can you ride bicycles, all of you?'

The child shook her head. 'Only Egbert,' she said; 'and that is because he stayed with a chap, last holidays, who lent him one. Bicycles are too jolly expensive for this family, you know,' she added quaintly.

Auntie Anna stood still and pointed the blue-k.n.o.bbed cane impressively at the child, who stood waiting. 'What do you say to a bicycle apiece all round,' she began, 'and----'

But Barbara did not wait to say anything. Back along the hall she scampered with all her might, and flung herself panting into the schoolroom. She burst out at once with a rapturous medley of news.

'Boys, boys!' she shouted at the top of her voice; 'the dragon isn't a dragon, she's like a fairy G.o.dmother out of a story-book! And she's going to send me to the adopted kid's school, and everybody is going to live at Crofts till father comes back, and there's going to be bicycles _all round_--no waiting 'cause you're the youngest, Bobbin!--and----'

Suddenly she paused and stammered, and paused again. Finally, she stood silent and uncomfortable, with the excitement and the thrill all gone out of her. She had quite forgotten Jill; and Jill, enthroned in the one arm-chair, with the one cushion at her back and the one footstool at her feet, was looking as though she was not there to be forgotten.

'I've just been telling the boys all about it,' she remarked.

Barbara stared. It put the finishing touch to her distrust of Jill, that she should have told anything to the boys--_her_ boys--before she had time to tell them herself.

'I--I think it's a shame!' she exclaimed hotly, and she bit her lip to keep from crying.

'Hullo, Babe! What's up?' asked Peter, in surprise.

Jill slipped out of the arm-chair, and laid her hand on the child's shoulder. 'I'm so sorry, Babs,' she began softly; 'I really didn't know----'

Barbara looked up at her doubtfully. The tone was kind, but then, why did she go on smiling in that irritating way? 'You don't understand,'

she said, and twisted herself free from Jill's grasp, and did not speak again until she was gone.

The boys took no notice of her; they always left the Babe alone when she was in one of her odd moods. But Jill, who had really meant to be kind, went away feeling puzzled. She had got over her first shyness of the boys in a very few minutes, for they were evidently trying to be friendly in their blunt, boyish fashion; but Barbara baffled her. There was something antagonistic in the child's manner; and Jill, who had always been accustomed to meeting with affection wherever she went, did not quite know what to make of her. Of course it was ridiculous to worry herself about a tomboy of eleven who chose to be sulky; but it was the first time any one had refused to make friends with her, and Jill was a little hurt about it.

'You're spoiled, my dear,' remarked her mother, as they drove away from the Berkeleys' house; 'and it is I who have spoiled you. I'm a silly old woman, but I never could bear to deny you all the sympathy you asked. I was afraid, you see, that you might think the world was not a nice place to be in.'

'I'm glad you spoiled me, and I think the world _is_ a nice place to be in,' answered Jill, laughing. 'But what has that to do with Barbara's not liking me?'

'Well, you can't expect every one to like you,' said the old lady, in her brusque way. 'Babs will like you well enough when she finds that she is still the Babe of the family, in spite of your being there.'

'But--but I don't like to feel that there is anybody anywhere who doesn't like me,' complained Jill, with a little pout.

'No more does the Babe, I expect,' said Mrs. Crofton, smiling. 'However, do your best to understand the poor little soul; she has not had much spoiling, and I should like you two to be friends.'

'Oh!' cried Jill, laughing again as she recalled the funny little figure that had come bounding into the schoolroom with such a yell and a clatter.

'But she really is rather impossible, mother dear!'

'Quite,' responded the old lady, drily; 'but she has amazing possibilities, and I thought you might perhaps like to find them.

Well, what about the others?'

'Oh, I like them,' said Jill; 'though I wish they would not all talk at once; it's so confusing. And I'm a little afraid of them, too. You never know why they are laughing at you; and if you take them seriously, they laugh more than ever. Whatever you do, they laugh.'

'Large families are always like that,' chuckled Mrs. Crofton.

'Large families are rather exhausting then, aren't they?' said Jill.

'The boys are rather rough too, and they seem so proud of having scars on their hands, and of being able to see a pig killed without feeling bad--at least, Peter was. Kit is different from the others: I like Kit.

And they _are_ frank! They were not ashamed of calling me the "adopted kid" to my face; and they even owned to having nicknamed you "the dragon"!'

The old lady laughed. 'So I am, as far as they know!' she replied. Then she patted the girl caressingly on the hand. 'My dear, it does us all good to be with people who are frank, even if they are a little rough with it.

And I want you to help me to put as much love and gentleness as we can into the Berkeleys' lives, for it strikes me that spoiling is what this large family wants.'

'Then it's what this large family will certainly get, if _you_ have anything to do with it,' answered Jill, softly.

In the schoolroom they had just left, the criticisms were brief and to the point.

'She'll do,' said Peter, condescendingly, 'when she's got over that silly way of gaping at us, as though we were beasts at the Zoo.'

'She's stunning to look at, and her clothes are just ripping,' said Egbert, the eldest; 'but, of course, you kids couldn't be expected to notice that.'

'Oh, you think you're everybody, just because you stayed with a chap last holidays who had a grown-up sister who called you _Mr._ Berkeley,' cried Wilfred.

Robin said he liked her soft way of speaking, and she reminded him of Nurse, which set them all laughing, as they recalled that homely-looking person in cap and spectacles. Christopher put in his opinion, when they had all had their say.

'She wants knowing,' he said briefly. 'There's too many of us in a lump to let her give herself away. When she takes us separately, or in pairs, we shall get on as right as rain. And she really does know something about stamps.'

But the Babe, who sat away in a corner by herself, said nothing. She had forgotten Jill for the moment, forgotten her own fit of jealousy and her shyness of the interloper, and she did not even hear what the others were talking about. She was going to school at last, and nothing else was of any consequence. Indeed, all through the week of whirl and preparation that followed, Barbara went about in a kind of dream. She could hardly yet believe in her good luck. A few short days ago things had seemed likely to go on for ever in the same uneventful way, except that they were going to be made dreary for a time by the absence of the father she adored; and now, just through the coming of an old lady, whom she had been prepared to hate, this amazing change in her future was going to take place. To an imaginative little person like Barbara, it was useless to pretend that there was nothing out of the ordinary in this. She had lived for years in a fairy world of her own, where Kit was a fairy prince and her father a nice old magician, and where numbers of charming princesses, the schoolgirls of her imagination, were ready to sympathise with her whenever the boys had been teasing her more than usual. It was surely to this kingdom of her fancy that a fairy G.o.dmother, who had once been a dragon, properly belonged; and all through that week, Barbara wandered in her imaginary kingdom with this new inhabitant of it, pointing out all its beauties to her, and even a.s.suring her that the magician would cure her rheumatism if she were to ask him nicely. 'Only, you must not make her back _quite_ straight,' she whispered privately to the magician, 'because she wouldn't be a proper fairy G.o.dmother if her back were straight!' She also added strict injunctions to the keeper of her gates, that a certain grown-up cousin, who might be known by her tiresome way of smiling at people, was not to be admitted under any circ.u.mstances into her fairy kingdom. 'It would never do,' thought Barbara, seriously, 'to have any one in my kingdom who wanted to laugh at me.'

Meanwhile, the busy preparations went on around her. It was not an easy thing to move a family of six from the home in which they had pa.s.sed the whole of their lives, especially when their aunt, in the large manner which characterised everything she did, insisted on allowing them to pack whatever they wished.

'We are only young once,' she represented to a distracted housekeeper, 'and possessions are very precious when we are young. Let them bring everything that will help to make the place seem like home to them; there is plenty of room at Crofts. Get tired of the things? Of course they will!

We can't expect them to be wiser than the grown-ups, can we?'

So Wilfred packed explosive liquids in bottles, and Peter packed cricket stumps and hockey clubs, and Christopher found room among Egbert's collars and ties to stow away microscope-slides and setting-boards and birds' eggs, and Robin brought innumerable contributions in the shape of torn picture-books and old toys that the others had discarded long ago. None of them ever forgot that last week in their London home; for besides the exquisite joys of packing up, there were also delightful expeditions up to town with Auntie Anna, ostensibly to buy clothes, but in reality to afford amus.e.m.e.nt to an old lady who had never enjoyed her life so much before; and whether they went alone with her, or in such numbers that the brougham was as full as it could be, the afternoon always ended with a magnificent tea without limitations--'Even ices to finish up with, and no one saying nothink about your makin' yourself ill 'cause you mixed things!' as Robin proclaimed on his return home from one of these expeditions.

Then there was the buying of the six bicycles; and even Barbara forgot for the moment all about school and everything else for the sake of her new two-wheeled possession, soon to be invested in her mind with magic properties and converted into a fairy messenger in her fairy kingdom.

She was less patient over the purchase of her school outfit, which kept her standing at the dressmaker's for whole half-hours together, when she might have been trying her bicycle round the square; and she wondered why it was necessary to have such quant.i.ties of clothes, just because she was going to live at school instead of at home. Surely, if her present wardrobe was good enough to pa.s.s the critical examination of five brothers, it need not be improved to meet the friendly gaze of a parcel of girls! However, Auntie Anna insisted on more clothes; and Auntie Anna was a witch, so she ought to know. And since she did not take the dressmaker's part, but even allowed Barbara to have her own way as to the shortness of her skirts, with an added inch or so to satisfy the scruples of the dressmaker, it was impossible to grumble very much at the precious time that was being wasted.

So the week drew swiftly to a close, and the day of departure came at last.

CHAPTER III