They had not seen half of them before a tea bell rang, and they had to return to the house. Julia had provided quite a nice tea: bread-and-butter, scones with jam, currant buns, and a big seed cake. She poured out tea for them, and then left them. Inez, with some importance, took her place, and poured out more cups of tea when wanted. Her tongue was very busy, and her little guests listened to her accounts of herself with surprise and awe. There seemed nothing that she could not and would not do.
She rode the cows as well as the horses bare-back, she drove the carts backwards and forwards to the Farm, she had a rope ladder which she fixed to all kinds of dangerous places, and she could climb up and down it like a monkey. Chris's eyes sparkled as he listened: this girl was more like a boy than anything else, he thought, and he began to long to join her in some of her mischievous pranks. When tea was over she suggested they should go to the battlements, and she took them through a narrow door, up a winding stone staircase, till they came out above the house. Here they had the greatest fun, running round the turreted towers and looking through the peepholes down to the country stretching out below them.
"You—you know what I'm going to do when I grow up?" Inez said. "I shall have a flying machine of my own, and fly all over the world."
"You couldn't do it," said Chris. "You'd come a cropper. It wants a proper airman to-fly."
"I'd be a proper airwoman," said Inez obstinately. "Now we'll come down and have some shooting. I have some bows and arrows. I've just one friend, Dick Yorke: he's the boy at the west lodge, and he makes stunning bows and arrows. He and I have shooting matches."
She led them on to the old lawn, left them there whilst she raced off to a shed, and came back in a few minutes with half a dozen bows in one hand and a bundle of arrows in the other.
This sport proved very exciting. Chris enjoyed it as much as anyone. They aimed at big paper targets fixed on some tree-trunks at the bottom of the lawn, and Chris and Inez both reached the bull's-eye.
There was no lack of occupation that evening. They went all over the stables, saw the two white terriers, the rabbits, chickens and turkeys, pigs and goats. They visited the barns, and enjoyed the swing that Inez had got one of the men to put up for her, and then, to their dismay, the big clock in the stable-yard struck seven.
Mrs. Inglefield had told them that they must leave Inez at seven o'clock.
When Chris said they must go, Inez declared that they should not.