Even in the twilight she recognized it at once, and when Katharina put her curly head forward, and said in a beseeching tone:  “May I get through, and will you listen to me?” she gladly signified her consent.

The water-wagtail, heedless of Paula’s hand held out to help her, slipped through the gap so nimbly that it was evident that she had not long ceased surmounting such obstacles in her games with Mary.  As swift as the wind she came down on her feet, holding out her arms to rush at Paula; but she suddenly let them fall in visible hesitancy, and drew back a step.  Paula, however, saw her embarrassment; she drew the girl to her, kissed her forehead, and gaily exclaimed: 

“Trespassing!  And why could you not come in by the gate?  Here comes my host with his hippopotamus thong.—­Stop, stop, good Rufinus, for the breach effected in your flowery wall was intended against me and not against you.  There stands the hostile power, and I should be greatly surprised if you did not recognize her as a neighbor?”

“Recognize her?” said the old man, whose wrath was quickly appeased.  “Do we know each other, fair damsel—­yes or no?  It is an open question.”

“Of course!” cried Katharina, “I have seen you a hundred times from the gnat-tower.”

“You have had less pleasure than I should have had, if I had been so happy as to see you.—­We came across each other about a year ago.  I was then so happy as to find you in my large peach-tree, which to this day takes the liberty of growing over your garden-plot.”

“I was but a child then,” laughed Katharina, who very well remembered how the old man, whose handsome white head she had always particularly admired, had spied her out among the boughs of his peach-tree and had advised her, with a good-natured nod, to enjoy herself there.

“A child!” repeated Rufinus.  “And now we are quite grown up and do not care to climb so high, but creep humbly through our neighbor’s hedge.”

“Then you really are strangers?” cried Paula in surprise.  “And have you never met Pulcheria, Katharina?”

“Pul?—­oh, how glad I should have been to call her!” said Katharina.  “I have been on the point of it a hundred times; for her mere appearance makes one fall in love with her,—­but my mother. . . .”

“Well, and what has your mother got to say against her neighbors?” asked Rufinus.  “I believe we are peaceable folks who do no one any harm.”

“No, no, God forbid!  But my mother has her own way of viewing things; you and she are strangers still, and as you are so rarely to be seen in church. . . .”

“She naturally takes us for the ungodly.  Tell her that she is mistaken, and if you are Paula’s friend and you come to see her—­but prettily, through the gate, and not through the hedge, for it will be closely twined again by to-morrow morning—­if you come here, I say, you will find that we have a great deal to do and a great many creatures to nurse and care for—­poor human creatures some of them, and some with fur or feathers, just as it comes; and man serves his Maker if he only makes life easier to the beings that come in his way; for He loves them all.  Tell that to your mother, little wagtail, and come again very often.”