Susanna had often teased me; but what wounded me this time was that I saw that they had been making my father and me the subject of censorious remarks at the parsonage, and that Susanna had been a party to it.  Had I known that she now sat there as my defeated advocate, I should certainly have done otherwise than I did, for with an offended look I passed on without bestowing a word upon her.

When I came home, I heard that the minister and my father had had a disagreement in the Court of Reconciliation.  The minister, who was a commissioner of that court, had said that he thought my father went too quickly forward in a certain case, and my father had given him a hasty answer.  It was on this occasion that judgment was passed upon us in the parsonage.

This state of affairs between our elders caused some shyness between us children, and I remember that at first I was even afraid to go by the parsonage, for fear of meeting the minister on the road.

Susanna, however, made several attempts at advances; but at the first glimpse of her blue-checked frock I always went a long way round, through the field above the road, or waited among the trees until she was gone.

For some time I saw nothing of her; but one day, as I was going through the gate, I saw written in pencil on the white board of the post that marked the rode [Rode—­a length of road.  The high-road is divided into rodes, and the division between these is marked by posts, on which stand the names of the houses, whose owners have to keep that portion of the road in repair.]:  “You are angry with me, but S. is not at all angry with you.”

I knew the large clumsy writing well, and I went back to the gate two or three times that day to read it over and over again.  It was Susanna in a new character; I saw her in thought behind the letters as behind a balustrade.  In the afternoon I wrote underneath:  “Look on the back of the post!” and there I wrote:  “D. is not angry with S. either.”

The next day Susanna was standing by the fence in the garden when I passed, but pretended not to see me; she probably repented having been so ready to make advances.

Although outwardly their relations were polite in the extreme, in reality my father’s intercourse with the minister was from this time broken off; they never, except on special occasions and in response to a solemn invitation, set foot within one another’s door.  This again gave a kind of clandestine character to the intercourse between me and Susanna.  No command was laid upon us, yet we only met, as it were, by stealth.

We were both lonely children.  Susanna sat at home, a prisoner to every-day tediousness, under her mother’s watchful eye, and in my dreary home I always had a feeling of cold and fright, and as if all gladness were over with Susanna at the parsonage.  It was therefore not surprising that we were always longing to be together.

As we grew older, opportunities were less frequent, but the longing only became the greater by being repressed, and the moments we could spend together gradually acquired, unknown to us, another than the old childish character.  To talk to her had now become a solace to me, and many a day I haunted the parsonage lands, only to get a glimpse of her.