'That's different,' he said vaguely. 'Jill's not a girl, exactly.'

'What is she, anyway?' demanded Peter.

Kit's genius was hard pressed. It was so stupid of people to take him literally. Robin saved his embarra.s.sment by suddenly rushing helter-skelter into the yard, from the direction of the carriage-drive.

'He's just driven in at the lodge gates,' he panted. 'An' Jill's waiting on the front doorstep. If you don't look sharp you won't cob them in time.'

The conspirators glanced hastily at one another. 'It's your turn, Kit,'

said Wilfred.

Kit started uncomfortably. 'I don't think so,' he objected. 'I'm not in the mood, and I should make a mess of it. You go, Peter.'

'All right, I'm on,' said Peter, and he strode briskly towards the front of the house, swinging his long arms as he went.

Robin danced round the other two gleefully. 'Silly old Doctor won't marry Jill, won't marry Jill, all on a summer's morning!' he chanted in a kind of refrain he made up on the spur of the moment.

Kit turned upon him sternly. 'Chuck it, Bobbin, unless you want your head cuffed!' he commanded, and walked off before he could be provoked into carrying out his threat.

Upstairs Barbara lay on the sofa by the window and waited for the Doctor's visit. Her leg was in plaster of Paris now, and she could be lifted on to the sofa by Egbert, every morning. It was less wearisome than lying in bed all day, but even the fun of pretending she was enchanted by an evil fairy did not make up for the dulness of staying in one room all through her first holidays. To be sure, she was going to Crofts the day after to-morrow, and Auntie Anna had promised that Jean and Angela should come and see her the very next Sat.u.r.day; but that did not make up for everything, and she hoped that if her bad fairy ever bewitched her again, she would manage to do it in term-time instead of when the boys came home.

The Doctor drove up just below as she came to this conclusion, and she forgot her own enchantment in the more thrilling amus.e.m.e.nt of thinking about his.

It was rather stupid of the Doctor, she reflected, to be such a long time working out the rest of his spell. Any one who had gone round the world seven times, as easily and as cheerfully as he had, might at least take the trouble to find a princess to rescue. He must really want to go on being a beast, she decided, as she craned her neck over the window-sill and watched him dismount from his gig. The princes in the fairy tales never wanted to go on being beasts; and it was very confusing. Just then, Jill came out on the doorstep, and she patted the horse and began to talk to the Doctor. Barbara laughed softly to herself. If only the cruel giant would come along now and clap Jill into a dungeon, the Doctor could rescue her on the spot and then stand before her in his real shape.

A prince and princess, who had no giant to bring them together, did not make the right sort of fairy tale at all.

'Hullo! There _is_ the giant!' exclaimed Babs, immediately afterwards, as Peter came striding across the lawn to interrupt the conversation on the doorstep. 'He must be the giant,' she continued, watching the trio below her with great interest, 'because the Doctor is looking so angry and Jill has such a funny, frightened look on her face. Besides, Peter looks like a giant; he's so big and dangerous looking. I wonder if the Doctor will kill the giant _now_, or--oh, dear! they've both come indoors and left the giant outside. I don't think I ever heard of the prince and princess running _away_ from the giant before. I'm sure that's wrong. How Peter is grinning--just like a horrid old giant. _Coo-ey_, Peter!'

The prince and princess came into the room, talking busily.

'If you don't come to-morrow,' Dr. Hurst was saying, 'I am afraid it will have to be put off indefinitely, as I am going away for ten days. When I come back, you will have gone to Crofts, you see.'

'I will ask Auntie Anna,' answered Jill.

Barbara seized the first opportunity to interrupt them. 'What's going to happen to-morrow, Dr. Hurst?' she demanded. 'Are you going to carry off the princess at last?'

'I--I don't think so,' said Dr. Hurst, sitting down beside her.

'Why don't you?' demanded the child.

'Well,' said Dr. Hurst, smiling, 'I don't know whether the princess is ready to be carried off. Are you so anxious to get rid of her?'

Both he and Jill were used by this time to her fancy for weaving the people she liked best into a fairy tale. But Jill was not smiling so much as usual this morning.

'I don't want to be carried off by anybody, thank you, Babs,' she said demurely.

'Oh, that doesn't make any difference,' Babs a.s.sured her. 'If you're a princess, you just have to be carried off whether you like it or not.'

'Then I'll be a new kind of princess, and refuse to have anything to do with the prince when he comes. Shall I, Babs?' suggested Jill, lightly.

Barbara looked at her doubtfully. Jill's idea was not like anything she had ever read in a fairy tale, and she did not think much of it.

'You see, you're _not_ a new kind of princess,' she answered simply. And the Doctor looked amused; but Jill hurried away to the other end of the room and began talking about temperatures.

The giant must have been very busy all that day, for he did not come near the invalid's room till just before supper. Kit came, and so did the other boys, but they only said vaguely that Peter was in the barn; and when he ran in at last to say good-night to her, she knew it was no use trying to find out what his plans were for locking up the princess. For Peter did not know that he was a giant, and he did not know that Jill was a princess; and it was better to go on with the story in her own way than to provoke Peter's great laugh by telling him about it. So she went to sleep and dreamed of the dear old magician, who had been away from her kingdom for four whole months, and was going to be away for two months more; and in her dream he came back and rescued the princess himself, and turned the beast into a prince for her. But that was only a dream, and in the morning the end of the story seemed further off than ever.

'Do let me see what you have been writing, Peter,' she shouted through her open window, just before lunch-time. Peter and Wilfred had been more than an hour composing a letter on the lawn below, with Robin jumping round them all the time, jogging their elbows and otherwise provoking them into outbreaks of fury that did not improve his behaviour in the least.

'_Do_, there's a dear, nice, darling boy,' begged Barbara, as the conspirators looked at one another and hesitated.

'It's a secret,' said Wilfred.

'I can keep a secret; you _know_ I can,' cried Babs, indignantly.

'It's about Jill,' explained Peter, 'and you might do her a great and lasting injury if you were to go and blab. Mightn't she, Will?'

'I think it's a shame,' protested Babs. 'Here am I shut up all alone, with a bad leg that hurts and hurts and----'

'Oh, let her see it. Anything for a quiet life,' interrupted Wilfred, and Peter strode upstairs with the letter.

'Promise faithfully you'll endure any amount of awful tortures, sooner than betray us?' he demanded threateningly, when he arrived in her room.

'I'll be killed first, honour bright,' said Barbara, solemnly; and the letter pa.s.sed into her hands. Her countenance grew very perplexed as she read it; for, to tell the truth, she could make neither head nor tail of its mysterious contents.

'Dearest Jill,' it ran,--'We the undersigned are anxious to save you from an awful and terrible fate that is hanging over your head. The barn, we know, is not a place you would choose to spend a happy afternoon in, but Peter has cleaned out as much of the filth as he can (he found several decayed martins' nests full of insects, two dead rats in an unspeakable condition, and a rotting owlet that made you squirm; so you see it might have been much worse, mightn't it?) And I (that's Wilfred) have successfully deposited in a box you will find secreted in the manger, two apples, some seed-cake (sorry it isn't plum, but there wasn't any), and a bottle of ginger beer. This, we think, will keep starvation from gnawing at you till the hour of release, which is seven o'clock, when we hope the Doctor will have given up waiting for you.

We would put some more things to eat, but they are a little difficult to get without arousing suspicion; and we are afraid of attracting the mice and rats, which are plentiful already, and of which we believe you are afraid. We the undersigned all hope, dear Jill, that you will not attribute base motives to our action in this matter. We do a.s.sure you, honest Injun, that though you may dislike us for the moment, you will thank us deeply all the rest of your life.--We have the honour to remain,

Wilfred Everard Berkeley, Peter Everard Berkeley, Robin Everard Berkeley.

'P.S.--Kit isn't in it, because he raised objections and we shunted him.

So your lifelong grat.i.tude need not be extended to him.'

'But when are you going to give Jill the letter?' asked Barbara, looking extremely puzzled, as she came to the end of this elaborate composition.

'We're not going to give it to her,' explained Peter. 'It's going to be dropped into the barn through a hole in the roof, as soon as Robin has coaxed her to go inside. The letter is to explain why we've locked her----'

He did not finish his sentence, for Wilfred called him from below, and he seized the sheet of paper and scampered off with it.

Barbara was left in a great state of bewilderment. Something was evidently going to happen to Jill, and it was apparently intended to save her from something that was much worse; but what it all meant was a mystery to her, and there was no one about to give her any more details. The three conspirators were careful to keep out of her way, and she did not see any more of them until after lunch, when they raced out of the front door and disappeared in the direction of the nine-acre field.

'I'm going to leave you for half an hour,' said Jill, when Barbara had finished her midday meal. 'Bobbin has been worrying me all dinner-time to go and look at a baby rabbit he has found, so I promised to run down to the barn and meet him there. Do you mind?'

Barbara said she did not mind at all; and she was left behind, consumed with curiosity as to whether Jill was really going to be locked into the barn, and whether it really could be for her good, as the boys had said, and whether Jill would be angry with them for doing it or would give them her lifelong grat.i.tude. Somehow, Babs did not believe in the lifelong grat.i.tude much; it did not seem likely that Jill would be grateful to any one for shutting her up in a dark and dirty barn for a whole afternoon, even if it was to save her from an awful fate that still remained to be explained. As she thought about it, Babs even began to wonder if she had been right in promising not to warn Jill.

But then, if it _was_ to save her from an awful fate, as Peter declared it was, it would have been very unkind to keep her from going down to the barn.