Chapter VIII

The Robin Who Showed the Way

She looked at the key quite a long time. She
turned it over and over, and thought about it.
As I have said before, she was not a child who had
been trained to ask permission or consult her elders
about things. All she thought about the key was
that if it was the key to the closed garden, and
she could find out where the door was, she could
perhaps open it and see what was inside the walls,
and what had happened to the old rose-trees. It
was because it had been shut up so long that she
wanted to see it. It seemed as if it must be different
from other places and that something
strange must have happened to it during ten years.
Besides that, if she liked it she could go into it
every day and shut the door behind her, and she
could make up some play of her own and play it
quite alone, because nobody would ever know
where she was, but would think the door was still
locked and the key buried in the earth. The
thought of that pleased her very much.

Living as it were, all by herself in a house with

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v?