Pamela made up her mind to see who they were, and looked about eagerly for a safe shelter. She reasoned that they would go round the bottom of the garden and back up the south side, so she hastened in the direction of the house, where very thick-growing shrubberies offered screens, and hid herself in the wettest possible bushes by the side of a direct path homeward.
Certainly ten minutes passed before anyone drew near. Then she was rewarded for her damp condition. Two women came along, talking. That is to say, one talked--never ceased to talk. The other, the silent one, was Mrs. Trewby, and she, looking as bilious and despondent as usual, listened with respectful misery stamped on her sallow face.
The person who did the talking puzzled Pamela's sharp examination. She was familiar, yet difficult to place. After they had passed, and the fussy voice chattered on, growing less audible, Pamela suddenly remembered who she was--Mrs. Chipman, Lady Shard's one-time lady's maid, and a well-known person at Crown Hill for some years. Her name had been Emily Baker in those days, when she was just as fussy and talkative. She married the butler at the Albert Gate house in London, and kept a lodging-house on the east coast. The War had done for the lodging-house, and the butler was slain by sickness in India. She had a pension and no doubt Lady Shard was kind to "my good Chipman", as she called her.
Pamela could just remember her at Crown Hill; now, she looked fatter, more dumpy, and more pompous, otherwise just the same. This discovery was a blow, because it was a simple explanation of the visitor to Woodrising--Chipman, sent down to stay with Mrs. Trewby, at the Shards' expense. Of course, but how dull! The girl could have nothing on earth to do with them.
As Pamela shook the wet off her skirt, she realized that she had been so intent on trying to remember Chipman that she never listened to a word she was saying. Rather depressed, she went back along the path to the corner, and as she went she heard Mrs. Chipman calling--"Countess--Countess."
"If they are going to let a dog out I'd better run," thought Pamela; and she went over the wall briskly, into the wooded meadow.
CHAPTER V
The Adventures of the Yawl
and her Crew
To go back to the start of the white yawl. After the mooring-buoy had "plopped" into the smooth sea, the sails half-filled, and then, as the pretty craft righted herself, they slackened again in a succession of sleepy rattles. Then followed a period of drifting to leeward, the dinghy drifting also, and bumping softly against the yacht's counter in a stupid manner.
Adrian flung himself on the deck and mopped his forehead; he said: