“You see—­you see,” she panted, “if no one knows but ourselves—­if there was a door, hidden somewhere under the ivy—­if there was—­and we could find it; and if we could slip through it together and shut it behind us, and no one knew any one was inside and we called it our garden and pretended that—­that we were missel thrushes and it was our nest, and if we played there almost every day and dug and planted seeds and made it all come alive—­”

“Is it dead?” he interrupted her.

“It soon will be if no one cares for it,” she went on.  “The bulbs will live but the roses—­”

He stopped her again as excited as she was herself.

“What are bulbs?” he put in quickly.

“They are daffodils and lilies and snowdrops.  They are working in the earth now—­pushing up pale green points because the spring is coming.”

“Is the spring coming?” he said.  “What is it like?  You don’t see it in rooms if you are ill.”

“It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine, and things pushing up and working under the earth,” said Mary.  “If the garden was a secret and we could get into it we could watch the things grow bigger every day, and see how many roses are alive.  Don’t you see?  Oh, don’t you see how much nicer it would be if it was a secret?”

He dropped back on his pillow and lay there with an odd expression on his face.

“I never had a secret,” he said, “except that one about not living to grow up.  They don’t know I know that, so it is a sort of secret.  But I like this kind better.”

“If you won’t make them take you to the garden,” pleaded Mary, “perhaps—­I feel almost sure I can find out how to get in sometime.  And then—­if the doctor wants you to go out in your chair, and if you can always do what you want to do, perhaps—­perhaps we might find some boy who would push you, and we could go alone and it would always be a secret garden.”

“I should—­like—­that,” he said very slowly, his eyes looking dreamy.  “I should like that.  I should not mind fresh air in a secret garden.”

Mary began to recover her breath and feel safer because the idea of keeping the secret seemed to please him.  She felt almost sure that if she kept on talking and could make him see the garden in his mind as she had seen it he would like it so much that he could not bear to think that everybody might tramp into it when they chose.

“I’ll tell you what I think it would be like, if we could go into it,” she said.  “It has been shut up so long things have grown into a tangle perhaps.”

He lay quite still and listened while she went on talking about the roses which might have clambered from tree to tree and hung down—­about the many birds which might have built their nests there because it was so safe.  And then she told him about the robin and Ben Weatherstaff, and there was so much to tell about the robin and it was so easy and safe to talk about it that she ceased to feel afraid.  The robin pleased him so much that he smiled until he looked almost beautiful, and at first Mary had thought that he was even plainer than herself, with his big eyes and heavy locks of hair.