is_ crying."

She put her hand accidentally upon the tapestry near her, and then
sprang back, feeling quite startled. The tapestry was the covering of a
door which fell open and showed her that there was another part of the
corridor behind it, and Mrs. Medlock was coming up it with her bunch of
keys in her hand and a very cross look on her face.

"What are you doing here?" she said, and she took Mary by the arm and
pulled her away. "What did I tell you?"

"I turned round the wrong corner," explained Mary. "I didn't know which
way to go and I heard some one crying."

She quite hated Mrs. Medlock at the moment, but she hated her more the
next.

"You didn't hear anything of the sort," said the housekeeper. "You come
along back to your own nursery or I'll box your ears."

And she took her by the arm and half pushed, half pulled her up one
passage and down another until she pushed her in at the door of her own
room.

"Now," she said, "you stay where you're told to stay or you'll find
yourself locked up. The master had better get you a governess, same as
he said he would. You're one that needs some one to look sharp after
you. I've got enough to do."

She went out of the room and slammed the door after her, and Mary went
and sat on the hearth-rug, pale with rage. She did not cry, but ground
her teeth.

"There _was_ some one crying--there _was_--there _was_!" she said to
herself.

She had heard it twice now, and sometime she would find out. She had
found out a great deal this morning. She felt as if she had been on a
long journey, and at any rate she had had something to amuse her all the
time, and she had played with the ivory elephants and had seen the gray
mouse and its babies in their nest in the velvet cushion.

CHAPTER VII

THE KEY OF THE GARDEN

Two days after this, when Mary opened her eyes she sat upright in bed
immediately, and called to Martha.

"Look at the moor! Look at the moor!"

The rain-storm had ended and the gray mist and clouds had been swept
away in the night by the wind. The wind itself had ceased and a
brilliant, deep blue sky arched high over the moorland. Never, never had
Mary dreamed of a sky so blue. In India skies were hot and blazing; this
was of a deep cool blue which almost seemed to sparkle like the waters
of some lovely bottomless lake, and here and there, high, high in the
arched blueness floated small clouds of snow-white fleece. The
far-reaching world of the moor