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.
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.
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?'