“I like you!  I like you!” she cried out, pattering down the walk; and she chirped and tried to whistle, which last she did not know how to do in the least.  But the robin seemed to be quite satisfied and chirped and whistled back at her.  At last he spread his wings and made a darting flight to the top of a tree, where he perched and sang loudly.

That reminded Mary of the first time she had seen him.  He had been swinging on a tree-top then and she had been 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, and the strange child who had lived in India, and been waited upon by “blacks,” was novelty enough to attract her.