she went into the garden, making for the shelter of the nearest shrubbery. Keeping out of sight of window view she followed the paths in and out towards the house. Everywhere she looked for "tracks", for footmarks in the wet soil, and was pleased when she found the trace of a shortish square-toed boot with nail-studded sole. Certainly Peter Cherry! She felt she was getting on in experience. So absorbed was she that she confused the bush fringed paths, and got mixed up as to which she had inspected. Then, she came on the neat, narrow print of a woman’s shoe, and stooped to examine it with intense interest. Here was a plain track, and she followed it some yards between overhanging, very wet apple-trees, till it turned the corner into a cross path. Pamela stopped and looked up and down. Surely she had been this way before. She looked back between the green walls and felt certain the look of it was familiar. A thought struck her and she slipped off one of her own shoes, and compared the sole to the shoe print. Either it was her own track--which she was crossing unawares--or somebody else wore exactly the same sized shoe. It was a maddening dilemma.

She was puzzling over this when she became aware of voices, not far distant, and coming nearer--from the house. Somebody was talking in what Pamela would have described as a "fussy voice". She stood listening, and might have been caught on that instant if the talkers had glanced down between the apple-trees, for two figures passed across the end of the alley she was in, and went on towards the kitchen-garden. 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 

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