Pamela Mardale, indeed, was at this time the despair of her mother. Mrs. Mardale had mapped out for her daughter an ideal career. She was to be a model of decorum in the Early Victorian style, at once an ornament for a drawing-room and an excellent housekeeper, and she was subsequently to make a brilliant marriage. The weak point of the scheme was that it left Pamela out of the reckoning. There was her passion for horses for one thing, and her distinct refusal, besides, to sit quietly in any drawing-room. When she was a child, horses had been persons to Pamela rather than animals, and, as her conduct showed, persons preferable by far to human beings. Visitors to the house under Croft Hill were at times promised a sight of Pamela, and indeed they sometimes did see a girl in a white frock, with long black legs, and her hair tumbled all over her forehead, neighing and prancing at them from behind the gate of the stable yard. But they did not see her at closer quarters than that, and it was certain that if by any chance her lessons were properly learnt, they had been learnt upon the corn-bin in the stables. Portraits of Pamela at the age of nine remain, and they show a girl who was very pretty, but who might quite well have been a boy, with a mass of unruly dark hair, a pair of active dark eyes, and a good-humoured face alertly watching for any mischief which might come its way. Something of the troubles which M. Giraud was likely to find ahead of him Mrs. Mardale disclosed that morning, and the schoolmaster returned to his house filled with apprehensions. The apprehensions, however, were not justified. The little schoolmaster was so shy, so timid, that Pamela was disarmed. She could be gentle when she chose, and she chose now. She saw, too, M. Giraud's anxiety to justify her mother's choice of him, and she determined with a sense of extreme virtue to be a credit to his teaching. They became friends, and thus one afternoon, when they had taken their books out into the garden of the villa, M. Giraud confided to her the history of the brochure which had made them acquainted. "It was not love for Roquebrune which led me to write it," he said. "It was, on the contrary, my discontent. I was tortured with longings, I was not content with the children's lessons for my working hours, and the wineshop for my leisure. I took long walks over Cap Martin to Mentone, along the Corniche road to La Turbie, and up Mont Agel. But still I had my longings as my constant companions, and since everywhere I saw traces of antiquity, I wrote this little history as a relief. It kept my thoughts away from the great world."