For two or three minutes she stood looking round her, while Toby watched her, and then she began to walk about softly, even more lightly than Toby had walked the first time he had found himself inside the four walls. Her eyes seemed to be taking in everything--the gray trees with the gray creepers climbing over them and hanging from their branches, the tangle on the walls and among the grass, the evergreen alcoves with the stone seats and tall flower urns standing in them.
"I never thought I'd see this place," she said at last, in a whisper.
"Did you know about it?" asked Toby.
He had spoken aloud and she made a sign to him.
"We must talk low," she said, "or some one'll hear us an' wonder what's to do in here."
"Oh! I forgot!" said Toby, feeling frightened and putting his hand quickly against his mouth. "Did you know about the garden?" he asked again when he had recovered himself. Destiny nodded.
"Mark told me there was one as no one ever went inside," she answered. "Us used to wonder what it was like."
She stopped and looked round at the lovely gray tangle about her, and her round eyes looked queerly happy.
"Eh! the nests as'll be here come springtime," she said. "It'd be th' safest nestin' place in England. No one never comin' near an' tangles o' trees an' roses to build in. I wonder all th' birds on th' moor don't build here."
Master Toby put his hand on her arm again without knowing it.
"Will there be roses?" he whispered. "Can you tell? I thought perhaps they were all dead."
"Eh! No! Not them--not all of 'em!" she answered. "Look here!"
She stepped over to the nearest tree--an old, old one with gray lichen all over its bark, but upholding a curtain of tangled sprays and branches. She took a thick knife out of her Pocket and opened one of its blades.
"There's lots o' dead wood as ought to be cut out," she said. "An' there's a lot o' old wood, but it made some new last year. This here's a new bit," and she touched a shoot which looked brownish green instead of hard, dry gray. Toby touched it himself in an eager, reverent way.
"That one?" he said. "Is that one quite alive quite?"
Destiny curved her wide smiling mouth.
"It's as wick as you or me," she said; and Toby remembered that Mark had told him that "wick" meant "alive" or "lively."
"I'm glad it's wick!" he cried out in his whisper. "I want them all to be wick. Let us go round the garden and count how many wick ones there are."
He quite panted with eagerness, and Destiny was as eager as he was. They went from tree to tree and from bush to bush. Destiny carried her knife in her hand and showed him things which he thought wonderful.
"They've run wild," she said, "but th' strongest ones has fair thrived on it. The delicatest ones has died out, but th' others has growed an' growed, an' spread an' spread, till they's a wonder. See here!" and she pulled down a thick gray, dry-looking branch. "A body might think this was dead wood, but I don't believe it is--down to th' root. I'll cut it low down an' see."
She knelt and with her knife cut the lifeless-looking branch through, not far above the earth.
"There!" she said exultantly. "I told thee so. There's green in that wood yet. Look at it."
Toby was down on his knees before she spoke, gazing with all his might.
"When it looks a bit greenish an' juicy like that, it's wick," she explained. "When th' inside is dry an' breaks easy, like this here piece I've cut off, it's done for. There's a big root here as all this live wood sprung out of, an' if th' old wood's cut off an' it's dug round, and took care of there'll be--" she stopped and lifted her face to look up at the climbing and hanging sprays above her--"there'll be a fountain o' roses here this summer."
