n standing in the orchard.
Now she was on the other side of the orchard and standing in the path
outside a wall--much lower down--and there was the same tree inside.
"It's in the garden no one can go into," she said to herself. "It's the
garden without a door. He lives in there. How I wish I could see what it
is like!"
She ran up the walk to the green door she had entered the first morning.
Then she ran down the path through the other door and then into the
orchard, and when she stood and looked up there was the tree on the
other side of the wall, and there was the robin just finishing his song
and beginning to preen his feathers with his beak.
"It is the garden," she said. "I am sure it is."
She walked round and looked closely at that side of the orchard wall,
but she only found what she had found before--that there was no door in
it. Then she ran through the kitchen-gardens again and out into the walk
outside the long ivy-covered wall, and she walked to the end of it and
looked at it, but there was no door; and then she walked to the other
end, looking again, but there was no door.
"It's very queer," she said. "Ben Weatherstaff said there was no door
and there is no door. But there must have been one ten years ago,
because Mr. Craven buried the key."
This gave her so much to think of that she began to be quite interested
and feel that she was not sorry that she had come to Misselthwaite
Manor. In India she had always felt hot and too languid to care much
about anything. The fact was that the fresh wind from the moor had begun
to blow the cobwebs out of her young brain and to waken her up a little.
She stayed out of doors nearly all day, and when she sat down to her
supper at night she felt hungry and drowsy and comfortable. She did not
feel cross when Martha chattered away. She felt as if she rather liked
to hear her, and at last she thought she would ask her a question. She
asked it after she had finished her supper and had sat down on the
hearth-rug before the fire.
"Why did Mr. Craven hate the garden?" she said.
She had made Martha stay with her and Martha had not objected at all.
She was very young, and used to a crowded cottage full of brothers and
sisters, and she found it dull in the great servants' hall down-stairs
where the footman and upper-housemaids made fun of her Yorkshire speech
and looked upon her as a common little thing, and sat and whispered
among themselves. Martha liked to talk,
|