'Leave him alone, Egbert!' she cried, but she did not wait to see whether he would. She scarcely supposed that he would stop teasing any one for her; besides, she never stayed to think, when once anything had roused her. So she put her head down and made a charge straight at the offender; and Egbert, being unprepared for the attack, fell backwards over the footstool, with his small sister on the top of him, while Robin wriggled free of them both and set up a louder howl than before in his surprise and dismay.
In the middle of the hubbub the door opened; and a voice, that attracted their attention at once because it was strange to them, made itself heard through the tumult.
'Is there anybody here who is called Babs?' asked the new-comer.
Barbara picked herself up and looked towards the door. A girl of about eighteen stood there--an exceedingly pretty girl in a pretty frock, as the Berkeley boys might have noticed if they had been given to noticing things of this kind. But her regular features and her pink-and-white complexion and her reddish-brown hair made very little impression upon them, and they only saw that she was dressed in a grown-up manner that was rather against her than otherwise. They decided, with the hasty judgment of a large family, that she was much too grand to be treated as a companion; and they prepared, quite unnecessarily, to resent any attempt of hers to be patronising.
Nothing was further from Jill's mind than to be patronising. She had never patronised any one in her life, not even the younger children at school, who always expected to be patronised; and she was not likely to begin now, with a set of schoolboys who frightened her out of her wits. For she had never had anything to do with boys before, and she had been dreading this moment ever since her return from abroad. She fully expected they would play practical jokes upon her, as the schoolboys in books always did; and she was not reassured by the uproar that met her ears when she opened the schoolroom door. It was ridiculous that she should feel shy, after travelling about for a whole year and meeting all sorts of people; but as she stood rather helplessly in the doorway, she certainly found that she was too shy to make the first advances.