Hallelujah!"

We never had another difference. Up to then he had been my willing
slave, and after that I was his.

With a smile and a shiver I turned from the border and its memories to
the door in the wall leading to the kitchen garden, in a corner of which
my own little garden used to be. The door was open, and I stood still a
moment before going through, to hold my breath and listen. The silence
was as profound as before. The place seemed deserted; and I should
have thought the house empty and shut up but for the carefully tended
radishes and the recent footmarks on the green of the path. They were
the footmarks of a child. I was stooping down to examine a specially
clear one, when the loud caw of a very bored looking crow sitting on the
wall just above my head made me jump as I have seldom in my life jumped,
and reminded me that I was trespassing. Clearly my nerves were all to
pieces, for I gathered up my skirts and fled through the door as though
a whole army of ghosts and cousins were at my heels, nor did I stop till
I had reached the remote corner where my garden was. "Are you enjoying
yourself, Elizabeth?" asked the mocking sprite that calls itself my
soul: but I was too much out of breath to answer.

This was really a very safe corner. It was separated from the main
garden and the house by the wall, and shut in on the north side by an
orchard, and it was to the last degree unlikely that any one would come
there on such an afternoon. This plot of ground, turned now as I saw
into a rockery, had been the scene of my most untiring labours. Into the
cold earth of this north border on which the sun never shone I had dug
my brightest hopes. All my pocket money had been spent on it, and as
bulbs were dear and my weekly allowance small, in a fatal hour I had
borrowed from Fraulein Wundermacher, selling her my independence,
passing utterly into her power, forced as a result till my next birthday
should come round to an unnatural suavity of speech and manner in her
company, against which my very soul revolted. And after all, nothing
came up. The labour of digging and watering, the anxious zeal with which
I pounced on weeds, the poring over gardening books, the plans made as I
sat on the little seat in the middle gazing admiringly and with the
eye of faith on the trim surface so soon to be gemmed with a thousand
flowers, the reckless expenditure of pfennings, the humiliation of my
position in regard to Fraulein Wunder