“Are things stirring down below in the dark in that garden where he lives?” Mary inquired.

“What garden?” grunted Weatherstaff, becoming surly again.

“The one where the old rose-trees are.”  She could not help asking, because she wanted so much to know.  “Are all the flowers dead, or do some of them come again in the summer?  Are there ever any roses?”

“Ask him,” said Ben Weatherstaff, hunching his shoulders toward the robin.  “He’s the only one as knows.  No one else has seen inside it for ten year’.”

Ten years was a long time, Mary thought.  She had been born ten years ago.

She walked away, slowly thinking.  She had begun to like the garden just as she had begun to like the robin and Dickon and Martha’s mother.  She was beginning to like Martha, too.  That seemed a good many people to like—­when you were not used to liking.  She thought of the robin as one of the people.  She went to her walk outside the long, ivy-covered wall over which she could see the tree-tops; and the second time she walked up and down the most interesting and exciting thing happened to her, and it was all through Ben Weatherstaff’s robin.

She heard a chirp and a twitter, and when she looked at the bare flower-bed at her left side there he was hopping about and pretending to peck things out of the earth to persuade her that he had not followed her.  But she knew he had followed her and the surprise so filled her with delight that she almost trembled a little.

“You do remember me!” she cried out.  “You do!  You are prettier than anything else in the world!”

She chirped, and talked, and coaxed and he hopped, and flirted his tail and twittered.  It was as if he were talking.  His red waistcoat was like satin and he puffed his tiny breast out and was so fine and so grand and so pretty that it was really as if he were showing her how important and like a human person a robin could be.  Mistress Mary forgot that she had ever been contrary in her life when he allowed her to draw closer and closer to him, and bend down and talk and try to make something like robin sounds.

Oh! to think that he should actually let her come as near to him as that!  He knew nothing in the world would make her put out her hand toward him or startle him in the least tiniest way.  He knew it because he was a real person—­only nicer than any other person in the world.  She was so happy that she scarcely dared to breathe.

The flower-bed was not quite bare.  It was bare of flowers because the perennial plants had been cut down for their winter rest, but there were tall shrubs and low ones which grew together at the back of the bed, and as the robin hopped about under them she saw him hop over a small pile of freshly turned up earth.  He stopped on it to look for a worm.  The earth had been turned up because a dog had been trying to dig up a mole and he had scratched quite a deep hole.