The girls were fearfully excited at the idea of such an adventure. They had never liked Mrs. Vernon, and now saw good ground for their suspicions. They wondered how much information she had gleaned at the camp, for Miss Hoyle and Miss Parker were not very discreet in their communications. They walked at once to the gardens, found their Romany friend among the strawberries, and with much secrecy told her the whole affair. As they had expected, she rose magnificently to the occasion.
“You leave it to us gipsies,” she assured them. “Bless you, we’re used to this kind of job. There’s a lot of us altogether working here, and I’ll pass the word on. There’ll be scouts this evening behind nearly every hedge, and if any German comes this way we’ll get him, I promise you. You keep your eye on that Mrs. Vernon! We may want a signal. 145 Look here, lady; come to the back of that shed, and I’ll teach you the gipsies’ whistle. Anybody with Romany blood in them’s bound to answer it.”
The gipsy’s whistle was a peculiar bird-like call, not very easy to imitate. Raymonde had to try again and again before she could accomplish it to her instructress’s satisfaction. At last, however, she had it perfectly.
“Don’t use it till you must,” cautioned her dark-eyed confederate; “but, if we hear it, it will bring the lot of us out. Now I must go back to my picking, or the agent will be turning me off.”
“And I must rush back to the camp,” declared Raymonde, remembering that Miss Gibbs, who had stayed with the invalid, would expect a report of the visit to the telephone. The excitement of the German letter had temporarily banished Katherine’s illness from her thoughts, and she reproached herself for her unkindness in forgetting her friend. The doctor called during the course of the morning, and, after examining the patient, pronounced her complaint to be neither measles, chicken-pox, nor anything of an infectious character, but merely a rash due to the eating of too many strawberries.
“They cause violent dyspepsia in some people,” he remarked. “I will make up a bottle of medicine, if you can send anybody over on a bicycle for it this afternoon. You mustn’t eat any more strawberries, young lady. They’d be simply poison to you at present. Oh yes! you may go and pick them; the occupation will do you no harm.”
Much relieved that they had not started a centre of infection in the camp, Katherine and Miss Gibbs 146 returned to work after lunch, the latter issuing special instructions to her girls against the excessive consumption of the fruit they were gathering. Katherine was inclined to pose as an interesting invalid, and to claim sympathy, but the general feeling of her schoolfellows was against that attitude, and the verdict was “Greedy pig! Serves her right!” which was not at all to her satisfaction.
“You’re most unkind!” she wailed. “You’ve every one of you eaten quite as many strawberries as I have, only I’ve a delicate digestion, and can’t stand them like you can. You’re a set of ostriches! I believe you’d munch turnips if you were sent to hoe them! I don’t mind what you say. So there!”
As half-past six drew on, and most of the workers were handing in their last baskets for the day, Raymonde and Aveline kept watchful eyes on Mrs. Vernon. They fully expected that she might disappear on the way back to the camp, so, without making their purpose apparent, they shadowed her, pretending that they were looking for flowers in the hedge. They hung about in the vicinity of her tent until supper-time, and changed their seats at table so that they might sit nearer to her in the marquee. When the meal was over, and the washing up and water carrying finished, nearly everybody collected for an amateur concert. Miss Hoyle had a banjo, which she played atrociously out of tune, but on which she nevertheless strummed accompaniments while the rest roared out “Little Grey Home in the West,” “The Long, Long Trail,” and other popular songs. It was certainly not classical music, but it was amusing; and, as everybody joined in the 147 choruses, the company consisted entirely of performers, with no audience except the cows in the adjacent pasture. Even Mrs. Vernon was singing, though with an inscrutable look in her grey eyes hardly suggestive of enjoyment.
“She’s doing it as a blind!” whispered Raymonde to Aveline. “Don’t let her out of your sight for a single moment!”