But after a few days spent almost entirely out of doors she wakened one morning knowing what it was to be hungry, and when she sat down to her breakfast she did not glance disdainfully at her porridge and push it away, but took up her spoon and began to eat it and went on eating it until her bowl was empty.

“Tha’ got on well enough with that this mornin’, didn’t tha’?” said Martha.

“It tastes nice to-day,” said Mary, feeling a little surprised herself.

“It’s th’ air of th’ moor that’s givin’ thee stomach for tha’ victuals,” answered Martha.  “It’s lucky for thee that tha’s got victuals as well as appetite.  There’s been twelve in our cottage as had th’ stomach an’ nothin’ to put in it.  You go on playin’ you out o’ doors every day an’ you’ll get some flesh on your bones an’ you won’t be so yeller.”

“I don’t play,” said Mary.  “I have nothing to play with.”

“Nothin’ to play with!” exclaimed Martha.  “Our children plays with sticks and stones.  They just runs about an’ shouts an’ looks at things.”

Mary did not shout, but she looked at things.  There was nothing else to do.  She walked round and round the gardens and wandered about the paths in the park.  Sometimes she looked for Ben Weatherstaff, but though several times she saw him at work he was too busy to look at her or was too surly.  Once when she was walking toward him he picked up his spade and turned away as if he did it on purpose.

One place she went to oftener than to any other.  It was the long walk outside the gardens with the walls round them.  There were bare flower-beds on either side of it and against the walls ivy grew thickly.  There was one part of the wall where the creeping dark green leaves were more bushy than elsewhere.  It seemed as if for a long time that part had been neglected.  The rest of it had been clipped and made to look neat, but at this lower end of the walk it had not been trimmed at all.

A few days after she had talked to Ben Weatherstaff Mary stopped to notice this and wondered why it was so.  She had just paused and was looking up at a long spray of ivy swinging in the wind when she saw a gleam of scarlet and heard a brilliant chirp, and there, on the top of the wall, perched Ben Weatherstaff’s robin redbreast, tilting forward to look at her with his small head on one side.

“Oh!” she cried out, “is it you—­is it you?” And it did not seem at all queer to her that she spoke to him as if she was sure that he would understand and answer her.

He did answer.  He twittered and chirped and hopped along the wall as if he were telling her all sorts of things.  It seemed to Mistress Mary as if she understood him, too, though he was not speaking in words.  It was as if he said: 

“Good morning!  Isn’t the wind nice?  Isn’t the sun nice?  Isn’t everything nice?  Let us both chirp and hop and twitter.  Come on!  Come on!”

Mary began to laugh, and as he hopped and took little flights along the wall she ran after him.  Poor little thin, sallow, ugly Mary—­she actually looked almost pretty for a moment.