intention of going to sleep, and, in fact, she was becoming wider
awake every day which passed at Misselthwaite. She was beginning to like
to be out of doors; she no longer hated the wind, but enjoyed it. She
could run faster, and longer, and she could skip up to a hundred. The
bulbs in the secret garden must have been much astonished. Such nice
clear places were made round them that they had all the breathing space
they wanted, and really, if Mistress Mary had known it, they began to
cheer up under the dark earth and work tremendously. The sun could get
at them and warm them, and when the rain came down it could reach them
at once, so they began to feel very much alive.

Mary was an odd, determined little person, and now she had something
interesting to be determined about, she was very much absorbed, indeed.
She worked and dug and pulled up weeds steadily, only becoming more
pleased with her work every hour instead of tiring of it. It seemed to
her like a fascinating sort of play. She found many more of the
sprouting pale green points than she had ever hoped to find. They seemed
to be starting up everywhere and each day she was sure she found tiny
new ones, some so tiny that they barely peeped above the earth. There
were so many that she remembered what Martha had said about the
"snowdrops by the thousands," and about bulbs spreading and making new
ones. These had been left to themselves for ten years and perhaps they
had spread, like the snowdrops, into thousands. She wondered how long it
would be before they showed that they were flowers. Sometimes she
stopped digging to look at the garden and try to imagine what it would
be like when it was covered with thousands of lovely things in bloom.

During that week of sunshine, she became more intimate with Ben
Weatherstaff. She surprised him several times by seeming to start up
beside him as if she sprang out of the earth. The truth was that she was
afraid that he would pick up his tools and go away if he saw her coming,
so she always walked toward him as silently as possible. But, in fact,
he did not object to her as strongly as he had at first. Perhaps he was
secretly rather flattered by her evident desire for his elderly company.
Then, also, she was more civil than she had been. He did not know that
when she first saw him she spoke to him as she would have spoken to a
native, and had not known that a cross, sturdy old Yorkshire man was not
accustomed to salaam to his