ing that she was
just behind in her galoshes, with her hand stretched out to seize me.
Passing the arbour, and peering into its damp recesses, I started back
with my heart in my mouth. I thought I saw my grandfather's stern eyes
shining in the darkness. It was evident that my anxiety lest the cousins
should catch me had quite upset my nerves, for I am not by nature
inclined to see eyes where eyes are not. "Don't be foolish, Elizabeth,"
murmured my soul in rather a faint voice, "go in, and make sure." "But
I don't like going in and making sure," I replied. I did go in, however,
with a sufficient show of courage, and fortunately the eyes vanished.
What I should have done if they had not I am altogether unable to
imagine. Ghosts are things that I laugh at in the daytime and fear at
night, but I think if I were to meet one I should die. The arbour had
fallen into great decay, and was in the last stage of mouldiness. My
grandfather had had it made, and, like other buildings, it enjoyed
a period of prosperity before being left to the ravages of slugs and
children, when he came down every afternoon in summer and drank his
coffee there and read his Kreuzzeitung and dozed, while the rest of us
went about on tiptoe, and only the birds dared sing. Even the mosquitoes
that infested the place were too much in awe of him to sting him; they
certainly never did sting him, and I naturally concluded it must be
because he had forbidden such familiarities. Although I had played there
for so many years since his death, my memory skipped them all, and went
back to the days when it was exclusively his. Standing on the spot
where his armchair used to be, I felt how well I knew him now from the
impressions he made then on my child's mind, though I was not conscious
of them for more than twenty years. Nobody told me about him, and he
died when I was six, and yet within the last year or two, that strange
Indian summer of remembrance that comes to us in the leisured times when
the children have been born and we have time to think, has made me
know him perfectly well. It is rather an uncomfortable thought for
the grown-up, and especially for the parent, but of a salutary and
restraining nature, that though children may not understand what is said
and done before them, and have no interest in it at the time, and though
they may forget it at once and for years, yet these things that they
have seen and heard and not noticed have after all impressed them