“I shall look in again in the course of a week,” announced Miss Mackenzie.—­“Good-bye, Baubie:  do everything Mrs. Duncan tells you.”

With this valedictory Miss Mackenzie left the matron, and Kate attended her down stairs; and Baubie was at last alone.

She remained standing stock-still when they left her by the bedside—­when the door, shut by Kate, who went out last, hid them from her view.  She listened in a stupid kind of way to the feet tramping on the bare boards of the outer dormitory and down the stairs:  then all was still, and Baubie Wishart, clean, clothed and separated from her father for the first time in her life, was left alone to consider how she liked “school.”  She felt cold and strange and lonely, and for about three minutes’ space she abandoned herself without reserve to the sensation.  Then the heavy shoes troubled her, and in a fit of anger and impatience she suddenly began to unlace one.  Some far-off sound startled her, and with a furtive, timorous look at the door she fastened it up again.  No one came, but instead of returning to the boot she sprang to the window, and, mounting the narrow sill, prepared to survey the domain that lay below it.  There was not much to see.  The window looked out on the back green, which was very much like the front, save that there was no flagged walk.  A few stunted poplars ran round the walls:  the grass was trodden nearly all off, and from wall to wall were stretched cords from which fluttered a motley collection of linen hung out to dry.  There was no looking out of it.  Baubie craned her adventurous small neck in all directions.  One side of the back green was overlooked by a tenement-house; the other was guarded by the poplars and a low stone wall; at the bottom was a dilapidated outhouse.  The sky overhead was all dull gray:  a formless gray sea-mist hurried across it, driven by the east wind, which found time as well to fill, as it passed, all the fluttering garments on the line and swell them into ridiculous travesties of the bodies they belonged to, tossing them the while with high mockery into all manner of weird contortions.

Baubie looked at them curiously, and wondered to herself how much they would all pawn for—­considerably more than three shillings no doubt.  She established that fact to her own satisfaction ere long, although she was no great arithmetician, and she sighed as she built and demolished an air-castle in her own mind.  Though there was but little attraction for her in the room, she was about to leave the window when her eye fell on a large black cat crouched on the wall, employed in surveillance of the linen or stalking sparrows or in deadly ambush for a hated rival.  Meeting Baubie’s glance, he sat up and stared at her suspiciously with a pair of round yellow, unwinking orbs.