her own.

The sun was shining inside the four walls and the high arch of blue sky
over this particular piece of Misselthwaite seemed even more brilliant
and soft than it was over the moor. The robin flew down from his
tree-top and hopped about or flew after her from one bush to another. He
chirped a good deal and had a very busy air, as if he were showing her
things. Everything was strange and silent and she seemed to be hundreds
of miles away from any one, but somehow she did not feel lonely at all.
All that troubled her was her wish that she knew whether all the roses
were dead, or if perhaps some of them had lived and might put out leaves
and buds as the weather got warmer. She did not want it to be a quite
dead garden. If it were a quite alive garden, how wonderful it would
be, and what thousands of roses would grow on every side!

Her skipping-rope had hung over her arm when she came in and after she
had walked about for a while she thought she would skip round the whole
garden, stopping when she wanted to look at things. There seemed to have
been grass paths here and there, and in one or two corners there were
alcoves of evergreen with stone seats or tall moss-covered flower urns
in them.

As she came near the second of these alcoves she stopped skipping. There
had once been a flower-bed in it, and she thought she saw something
sticking out of the black earth--some sharp little pale green points.
She remembered what Ben Weatherstaff had said and she knelt down to look
at them.

"Yes, they are tiny growing things and they _might_ be crocuses or
snowdrops or daffodils," she whispered.

She bent very close to them and sniffed the fresh scent of the damp
earth. She liked it very much.

"Perhaps there are some other ones coming up in other places," she said.
"I will go all over the garden and look."

She did not skip, but walked. She went slowly and kept her eyes on the
ground. She looked in the old border beds and among the grass, and after
she had gone round, trying to miss nothing, she had found ever so many
more sharp, pale green points, and she had become quite excited again.

"It isn't a quite dead garden," she cried out softly to herself. "Even
if the roses are dead, there are other things alive."

She did not know anything about gardening, but the grass seemed so thick
in some of the places where the green points were pushing their way
through that she thought they did not seem to have room enough to