Her skipping-rope had hung over her arm when she came
in and after she had walked about for a while she thought
she would skip round the whole garden, stopping when she
wanted to look at things. There seemed to have been
grass paths here and there, and in one or two corners
there were alcoves of evergreen with stone seats or tall
moss-covered flower urns in them.
As she came near the second of these alcoves she
stopped skipping. There had once been a flowerbed in it,
and she thought she saw something sticking out of the
black earth- -some sharp little pale green points.
She remembered what Ben Weatherstaff had said and she
knelt down to look at them.
"Yes, they are tiny growing things and they might be
crocuses or snowdrops or daffodils," she whispered.
She bent very close to them and sniffed the fresh scent
of the damp earth. She liked it very much.
"Perhaps there are some other ones coming up in other places,"
she said. "I will go all over the garden and look."
She did not skip, but walked. She went slowly and kept
her eyes on the ground. She looked in the old border
beds and among the grass, and after she had gone round,
trying to miss nothing, she had found ever so many more sharp,
pale green points, and she had become quite excited again.
"It isn't a quite dead garden," she cried out softly to herself.
"Even if the roses are dead, there are other things alive."
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