you are caught?" And
thus exhorting myself to action, and recognising how great was the risk
I ran in lingering, I started down the little path leading to the arbour
and the principal part of the garden, going, it is true, on tiptoe, and
very much frightened by the rustling of my petticoats, but determined to
see what I had come to see and not to be scared away by phantoms.

How regretfully did I think at that moment of the petticoats of my
youth, so short, so silent, and so woollen! And how convenient the
canvas shoes were with the india rubber soles, for creeping about
without making a sound! Thanks to them I could always run swiftly and
unheard into my hiding-places, and stay there listening to the garden
resounding with cries of "Elizabeth! Elizabeth! Come in at once to your
lessons!" Or, at a different period, "Ou etes-vous donc, petite sotte?"
Or at yet another period, "Warte nur, wenn ich dich erst habe!" As the
voices came round one corner, I whisked in my noiseless clothes round
the next, and it was only Fraulein Wundermacher, a person of resource,
who discovered that all she needed for my successful circumvention was
galoshes. She purchased a pair, wasted no breath calling me, and would
come up silently, as I stood lapped in a false security lost in the
contemplation of a squirrel or a robin, and seize me by the shoulders
from behind, to the grievous unhinging of my nerves. Stealing along
in the fog, I looked back uneasily once or twice, so vivid was this
disquieting memory, and could hardly be reassured by putting up my hand
to the elaborate twists and curls that compose what my maid calls my
Frisur, and that mark the gulf lying between the present and the past;
for it had happened once or twice, awful to relate and to remember, that
Fraulein Wundermacher, sooner than let me slip through 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 feel