.

One day, as I came homewards along the road, with my books under my arm,
she was sitting in her blue-checked frock and straw hat, on the steps
by the side of the gate. She looked as if she were in a very bad temper,
and I could see at once that I was in for something.

She did not answer my greeting; but when I attempted to slip through the
gate a little more quickly than she liked, she asked me in an irritated
tone if it were true, as they said, that I was so lazy that they could
make nothing of me at home.

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 n