Not until they reached home and were sitting round the fire after 'high tea' did Isobel remember that she had meant to buy a camera in Inchmoor.
"I must get it when I go over to Madame Clarence's for my first lesson," she said. "It will be amusing to keep a photographic record of my visit here."
She had told them all about Madame during the walk home, and now tried to persuade one of them to join her in having dancing-lessons. Nothing definite was settled that night, and Isobel left them to think the matter over.
The following day the girls made an attempt to start on their programme of work. Caroline put in a couple of hours sewing. Beryl practised and copied out some music. And Pamela got out her sketch-book. But what was poor Isobel to do without a Madame Clarence, or a camera at hand? She wandered round the garden for a time, and then she went indoors and talked to Caroline; but finding this too dull, she roamed round the house—keeping a safe distance from the locked door—and went in and out of various rooms, and stood looking out of windows and yawning, until she was almost bored to tears. It was curious, she thought to herself, that the very sight of other people working made her restless and disinclined to settle down to read or write or sew or do anything at all.
Unfortunately this seemed to be the case throughout her stay at Chequertrees; she never wanted to work when other people were working, and consequently there were frequent interruptions from her. Pamela found that the only time she could work indoors undisturbed was when Isobel was over in Inchmoor at her dancing-lessons. Isobel was one of those unhappy people who cannot entertain themselves, but who always want somebody else to be entertaining them.
On this first occasion, when the other three were working and Isobel yawning, Pamela bore it as long as she could, then, packing her sketching materials away with a sigh of regret, she invited Isobel to come out and do a bit of gardening with her. Isobel hated gardening, but it meant some one to talk to, and so she jumped at the idea eagerly. Pamela was not over-fond of gardening, she knew very little about it, but anything was better than hearing Isobel's restless feet wandering about and listening to her audible sighs and yawns.
Out of doors it was rather cold, so they wrapped up warmly, and set to work to 'tidy up a bit' in the garden at the back of the house.
For a while all went well and Isobel chatted away to her heart's content, while Pamela tied up some withered-looking plants (whose name she did not know) with a length of twine she had found in the kitchen. Martha was upstairs getting dressed for the afternoon when the two girls started on their new occupation, and Ellen was out shopping in the village, otherwise Pamela and Isobel might have been warned about old Silas Sluff. As it was, they continued their gardening, blissfully unconscious that old Silas was just round the corner of the gravel path, behind the privet hedge that separated the vegetable garden from the lawn and flowers.
"I think," said Pamela, "this old bush ought to be trimmed a bit—I wonder if there's a pair of shears handy.... Is this the right time of year to cut it though? ... What do you think?"
"Oh, I expect so," said Isobel at random, knowing nothing about it. "Any time would be all right with those sturdy old bushes—I don't know where the shears are, but here's a pair of old scissors I brought out from the kitchen—they'd do, wouldn't they? Here, let me do a bit of trimming. And, do you know, mater had promised me and Gerald that in any case we should..." She continued a lengthy story that she had started to recount for Pamela's benefit.