Colin turned his head, frowning.

“Am I queer?” he demanded.

“Yes,” answered Mary, “very.  But you needn’t be cross,” she added impartially, “because so am I queer—­and so is Ben Weatherstaff.  But I am not as queer as I was before I began to like people and before I found the garden.”

“I don’t want to be queer,” said Colin.  “I am not going to be,” and he frowned again with determination.

He was a very proud boy.  He lay thinking for a while and then Mary saw his beautiful smile begin and gradually change his whole face.

“I shall stop being queer,” he said, “if I go every day to the garden.  There is Magic in there—­good Magic, you know, Mary.  I am sure there is.”

“So am I,” said Mary.

“Even if it isn’t real Magic,” Colin said, “we can pretend it is. Something is there—­something!”

“It’s Magic,” said Mary, “but not black.  It’s as white as snow.”

They always called it Magic and indeed it seemed like it in the months that followed—­the wonderful months—­the radiant months—­the amazing ones.  Oh! the things which happened in that garden!  If you have never had a garden, you cannot understand, and if you have had a garden you will know that it would take a whole book to describe all that came to pass there.  At first it seemed that green things would never cease pushing their way through the earth, in the grass, in the beds, even in the crevices of the walls.  Then the green things began to show buds and the buds began to unfurl and show color, every shade of blue, every shade of purple, every tint and hue of crimson.  In its happy days flowers had been tucked away into every inch and hole and corner.  Ben Weatherstaff had seen it done and had himself scraped out mortar from between the bricks of the wall and made pockets of earth for lovely clinging things to grow on.  Iris and white lilies rose out of the grass in sheaves, and the green alcoves filled themselves with amazing armies of the blue and white flower lances of tall delphiniums or columbines or campanulas.

“She was main fond o’ them—­she was,” Ben Weatherstaff said.  “She liked them things as was allus pointin’ up to th’ blue sky, she used to tell.  Not as she was one o’ them as looked down on th’ earth—­not her.  She just loved it but she said as th’ blue sky allus looked so joyful.”

The seeds Dickon and Mary had planted grew as if fairies had tended them.  Satiny poppies of all tints danced in the breeze by the score, gaily defying flowers which had lived in the garden for years and which it might be confessed seemed rather to wonder how such new people had got there.  And the roses—­the roses!  Rising out of the grass, tangled round the sun-dial, wreathing the tree trunks and hanging from their branches, climbing up the walls and spreading over them with long garlands falling in cascades—­they came alive day by day, hour by hour.  Fair fresh leaves, and buds—­and buds—­tiny at first but swelling and working Magic until they burst and uncurled into cups of scent delicately spilling themselves over their brims and filling the garden air.