Page 39 - Secret Garden

“Can you really talk to animals and birds?”she asked? Dickon considered this. “I think so, and they think so.
I’ve lived on the moor with ’em so long that sometimes I think maybe I’m a bird, or a fox, or a rabbit and I dun know it!
See here: I’ll help you plant yon seeds.
Where’s tha garden?”
Mary’s lips stayed tight closed.
“Tha’s got a bit o’ garden, right?”
Mary stared back at him with wild, anxious eyes.
At last she said, “I don’t know anything about boys. Can you keep a secret?”
She did not mean to clutch hold of his sleeve, but found herself holding it.
“I’ve stolen a garden! It isn’t mine. Nobody wants it. Nobody cares for it. Maybe everything’s dead there already
– I don’t know. But I don’t care! Nobody has any right to take it from me when I love it and they don’t!” Then she burst into tears.
Dickon’s blue eyes grew rounder and rounder. “Eh-h-h,” he sighed. It meant astonishment. It meant ‘there-there’.