It was twenty minutes before Isabelle arrived, clearly indicating she had not been at all ready for her early summons. I had spent that time carefully considering my strategy. Isabelle increasingly seemed to be pushing back about the discipline and regime that I was attempting to enforce, to the extent that I now thought she was deliberately behaving poorly in order to gain more severe punishments. She would then endure the punishments I sentenced her to almost as another form of defiance, showing me should could take them but that they didn't have any effect on her behaviour. It had been particularly hard on Isabelle to have lost her real mother at the young age that she did and she had found my coming into her family's life difficult to adjust to, but I had concluded that if I didn't take decisive action now, it might be too late.