“Ah, go along.  Still waters run deep—­But come, let us swing, two on a side; I don’t believe it will break.  Or if you don’t care to, for you are drawing long faces again, then we will play hide-and-seek.  I still have a quarter of an hour.  I don’t want to go in, yet, and anyhow it is merely to say:  ‘How do you do?’ to a district councillor, and a district councillor from Further Pomerania to boot.  He is elderly, too.  Why he might almost be my father; and if he actually lives in a seaport, for, you know, that is what Kessin is said to be, I really ought to make the best impression upon him in this sailor costume, and he ought almost to consider it a delicate attention.  When princes receive anybody, I know from what papa has told me, they always put on the uniform of the country of their guest.  So don’t worry—­Quick, quick, I am going to hide and here by the bench is the base.”

Hulda was about to fix a few boundaries, but Effi had already run up the first gravel walk, turning to the left, then to the right, and suddenly vanishing from sight.  “Effi, that does not count; where are you?  We are not playing run away; we are playing hide-and-seek.”  With these and similar reproaches the girls ran to search for her, far beyond the circular bed and the two plane trees standing by the side of the path.  She first let them get much farther than she was from the base and then, rushing suddenly from her hiding place, reached the bench, without any special exertion, before there was time to say:  “one, two, three.”

“Where were you?”

“Behind the rhubarb plants; they have such large leaves, larger even than a fig leaf.”

“Shame on you.”

“No, shame on you, because you didn’t catch me.  Hulda, with her big eyes, again failed to see anything.  She is always slow.”  Hereupon Effi again flew away across the circle toward the pond, probably because she planned to hide at first behind a dense-growing hazelnut hedge over there, and then from that point to take a long roundabout way past the churchyard and the front house and thence back to the wing and the base.  Everything was well calculated, but before she was half way round the pond she heard some one at the house calling her name and, as she turned around, saw her mother waving a handkerchief from the stone steps.  In a moment Effi was standing by her.

“Now you see that I knew what I was talking about.  You still have that smock-frock on and the caller has arrived.  You are never on time.”

“I shall be on time, easily, but the caller has not kept his appointment.  It is not yet one o’clock, not by a good deal,” she said, and turning to the twins, who had been lagging behind, called to them:  “Just go on playing; I shall be back right away.”

The next moment Effi and her mama entered the spacious drawing-room, which occupied almost the whole ground floor of the side wing.

“Mama, you daren’t scold me.  It is really only half past.  Why does he come so early?  Cavaliers never arrive too late, much less too early.”