y stood up and looked at it with an almost frightened face
as it hung from her finger.

"Perhaps it has been buried for ten years," she said in a whisper.
"Perhaps it is the key to the garden!"

CHAPTER VIII

THE ROBIN WHO SHOWED THE WAY

She looked at the key quite a long time. She turned it over and over,
and thought about it. As I have said before, she was not a child who had
been trained to ask permission or consult her elders about things. All
she thought about the key was that if it was the key to the closed
garden, and she could find out where the door was, she could perhaps
open it and see what was inside the walls, and what had happened to the
old rose-trees. It was because it had been shut up so long that she
wanted to see it. It seemed as if it must be different from other places
and that something strange must have happened to it during ten years.
Besides that, if she liked it she could go into it every day and shut
the door behind her, and she could make up some play of her own and play
it quite alone, because nobody would ever know where she was, but would
think the door was still locked and the key buried in the earth. The
thought of that pleased her very much.

Living as it were, all by herself in a house with a hundred
mysteriously closed rooms and having nothing whatever to do to amuse
herself, had set her inactive brain to working and was actually
awakening her imagination. There is no doubt that the fresh, strong,
pure air from the moor had a great deal to do with it. Just as it had
given her an appetite, and fighting with the wind had stirred her blood,
so the same things had stirred her mind. In India she had always been
too hot and languid and weak to care much about anything, but in this
place she was beginning to care and to want to do new things. Already
she felt less "contrary," though she did not know why.

She put the key in her pocket and walked up and down her walk. No one
but herself ever seemed to come there, so she could walk slowly and look
at the wall, or, rather, at the ivy growing on it. The ivy was the
baffling thing. Howsoever carefully she looked she could see nothing but
thickly-growing, glossy, dark green leaves. She was very much
disappointed. Something of her contrariness came back to her as she
paced the walk and looked over it at the tree-tops inside. It seemed so
silly, she said to herself, to be near it and not be able to get in. She
took the key in her poc