Her father, a strict observer of the correct and a pious believer in God for other people, attended Divine Service as regularly as he wound the clocks and paid the accounts.  He repraesentierte, as the German phrase went; and his wife and children were expected to repraesentieren too.  Which they did uncomplainingly; for when one has to do with determined husbands and fathers it is quickest not to complain.  But the pins and needles that patient child endured, Anna-Felicitas remembered, looking back through the years at the bunched-up figure on the chair as at a stranger, were something awful.  The edge of the chair just caught her legs in the pins and needles place.  If she had been a little bigger or a little smaller it wouldn’t have happened; as it was, St. Paul wrestling with beasts at Ephesus wasn’t more heroic than Anna-Felicitas perceived that distant child to have been, silently Sunday after Sunday bearing her legs.  Then one Sunday something snapped inside her, and she heard her own voice floating out into the void above the heads of the mumbling worshippers, and it said with a terrible distinctness in a sort of monotonous wail:  “I only had a cold potato for breakfast,”—­and a second time, in the breathless suspension of mumbling that followed upon this:  “I only had a cold potato for breakfast,”—­and a third time she opened her mouth to repeat the outrageous statement, regardless of her mother’s startled hand laid on her arm, and of Anna-Rose’s petrified stare, and of the lifted faces of the congregation, and of the bent, scandalized brows of the pastor,—­impelled by something that possessed her, unable to do anything but obey it; but her father, a man of deeds, rose up in his place, took her in his arms, and carried her down the stairs and out of the church.  And the minute she found herself really rescued, and out where the sun and wind, her well-known friends, were larking about among the tombstones, she laid her cheek as affectionately against her father’s head as if she were a daughter to be proud of, and would have purred if she had had had a purr as loudly as the most satisfied and virtuous of cats.

“Mein Kind,” said her father, standing her up on a convenient tomb so that her eyes were level with his, “is it then true about the cold potato?”

“No,” said Anna-Felicitas patting his face, pleased at what her legs were feeling like again.

“Mein Kind,” said her father, “do you not know it is wrong to lie?”

“No,” said Anna-Felicitas placidly, the heavenly blue of her eyes, gazing straight into his, exactly like the mild sky above the trees.

“No?” echoed her father, staring at her.  “But, Kind, you know what a lie is?”

“No,” said Anna-Felicitas, gazing at him tenderly in her satisfaction at being restored to a decent pair of legs; and as he still stood staring at her she put her hands one on each of his cheeks and squeezed his face together and murmured, “Oh, I do love you.”