"Nothin' to play with!" exclaimed Martha. "Our children plays with
sticks and stones. They just runs about an' shouts an' looks at things."

Mary did not shout, but she looked at things. There was nothing else to
do. She walked round and round the gardens and wandered about the paths
in the park. Sometimes she looked for Ben Weatherstaff, but though
several times she saw him at work he was too busy to look at her or was
too surly. Once when she was walking toward him he picked up his spade
and turned away as if he did it on purpose.

One place she went to oftener than to any other. It was the long walk
outside the gardens with the walls round them. There were bare
flower-beds on either side of it and against the walls ivy grew thickly.
There was one part of the wall where the creeping dark green leaves were
more bushy than elsewhere. It seemed as if for a long time that part had
been neglected. The rest of it had been clipped and made to look neat,
but at this lower end of the walk it had not been trimmed at all.

A few days after she had talked to Ben Weatherstaff Mary stopped to
notice this and wondered why it was so. She had just paused and was
looking up at a long spray of ivy swinging in the wind when she saw a
gleam of scarlet and heard a brilliant chirp, and there, on the top of
the wall, perched Ben Weatherstaff's robin redbreast, tilting forward
to look at her with his small head on one side.

"Oh!" she cried out, "is it you--is it you?" And it did not seem at all
queer to her that she spoke to him as if she was sure that he would
understand and answer her.

He did answer. He twittered and chirped and hopped along the wall as if