Then she slipped through it, and shut it behind her, and stood with her back against it, looking about her and breathing quite fast with excitement, and wonder, and delight.

She was standing inside the secret garden.

CHAPTER IX

THE STRANGEST HOUSE ANY ONE EVER LIVED IN

It was the sweetest, most mysterious-looking place any one could imagine.  The high walls which shut it in were covered with the leafless stems of climbing roses which were so thick that they were matted together.  Mary Lennox knew they were roses because she had seen a great many roses in India.  All the ground was covered with grass of a wintry brown and out of it grew clumps of bushes which were surely rose-bushes if they were alive.  There were numbers of standard roses which had so spread their branches that they were like little trees.  There were other trees in the garden, and one of the things which made the place look strangest and loveliest was that climbing roses had run all over them and swung down long tendrils which made light swaying curtains, and here and there they had caught at each other or at a far-reaching branch and had crept from one tree to another and made lovely bridges of themselves.  There were neither leaves nor roses on them now and Mary did not know whether they were dead or alive, but their thin gray or brown branches and sprays looked like a sort of hazy mantle spreading over everything, walls, and trees, and even brown grass, where they had fallen from their fastenings and run along the ground.  It was this hazy tangle from tree to tree which made it all look so mysterious.  Mary had thought it must be different from other gardens which had not been left all by themselves so long; and indeed it was different from any other place she had ever seen in her life.

“How still it is!” she whispered.  “How still!”

Then she waited a moment and listened at the stillness.  The robin, who had flown to his tree-top, was still as all the rest.  He did not even flutter his wings; he sat without stirring, and looked at Mary.

“No wonder it is still,” she whispered again.  “I am the first person who has spoken in here for ten years.”

She moved away from the door, stepping as softly as if she were afraid of awakening some one.  She was glad that there was grass under her feet and that her steps made no sounds.  She walked under one of the fairy-like gray arches between the trees and looked up at the sprays and tendrils which formed them.

“I wonder if they are all quite dead,” she said.  “Is it all a quite dead garden?  I wish it wasn’t.”

If she had been Ben Weatherstaff she could have told whether the wood was alive by looking at it, but she could only see that there were only gray or brown sprays and branches and none showed any signs of even a tiny leaf-bud anywhere.

But she was inside the wonderful garden and she could come through the door under the ivy any time and she felt as if she had found a world all her own.