her fingers, had actually caught me by the long plait of hair
to whose other end I was attached and whose English name
I had been told was pigtail, just at the instant when I
was springing away from her into the bushes; and so had led
me home triumphant, holding on tight to the rope of hair,
and muttering with a broad smile of special satisfaction,
"Diesmal wirst du mir aber nicht entschlupfen!"
Fraulein Wundermacher, now I came to think of it, must have been
a humourist. She was certainly a clever and a capable woman.
But I wished at that moment that she would not haunt me
so persistently, and that I could get rid of the feeling that
she was just behind in her galoshes, with her hand stretched
out to seize me.
Passing the arbour, and peering into its damp recesses, I started
back with my heart in my mouth. I thought I saw my grandfather's
stern eyes shining in the darkness. It was evident that my anxiety
lest the cousins should catch me had quite upset my nerves,
for I am not by nature inclined to see eyes where eyes are not.
"Don't be foolish, Elizabeth," murmured my soul in rather
a faint voice, "go in, and make sure." "But I don't like going
in and making sure," I replied. I did go in, however, with a
sufficient show of courage, and fortunately the eyes vanished.
What I should have done if they had not I am altogether unable to imagine.
Ghosts are things that I laugh at in the daytime and fear at night,
but I think if I were to meet one I should die. The arbour had
fallen into great decay, and was in the last stage of mouldiness.
My grandfather had had it made, and, like other buildings,
it enjoyed a period of prosperity before being left to the ravages
of slugs and children, when he came down every afternoon in summer
and drank his coffee there and read his Kreuzzeitung and dozed,