Nurse Branscome looked at him squarely.
"If I could save her from that!"
"You would risk appearances?"
"Gladly.… Will you show me the letter?"
Brother Copas shook his head.
"You must take it on faith from me for a while… at any rate until I find out who in St. Hospital begins her 'w's' with a curl like a ram's horn. Did you leave the child with her father?"
"No; she had run out to the kitchen garden. Since she has discovered it she goes there regularly twice a day, morning and evening. I can't think why, and she won't tell. She is the queerest child."
The walled kitchen garden of St. Hospital lies to the south, between the back of the "Nunnery" and the River Mere. It can be reached from the ambulatory by a dark, narrow tunnel under the nurses' lodgings. The Brethren never went near it. For years old Battershall, the gardener, had dug there in solitude—day in, day out—and had grown his vegetables, hedged in from all human intercourse, nor grumbling at his lot.
Corona, exploring the precincts, had discovered this kitchen garden, found it to her mind, and thereafter made free of it with the cheerfullest insouciance. The dark tunnel, to begin with, put her in mind of some adventure in a fairy tale she could not recall; but it opened of a sudden and enchantingly upon sunshine and beds of onions, parsley, cabbages, with pale yellow butterflies hovering. Old Battershall, too, though taciturn, was obviously not displeased by her visits. He saw that while prying here and there—especially among the parsley beds, for what reason he could not guess—the child stole no fruit, did no harm. She trampled nothing. She lifted no leaf to harm it. When she stopped to speak with him her talk was "just nonsense, you know." Unconsciously, by the end of the third day he had looked up twice or thrice from his delving, asking himself why she was late.
And what (do you suppose) did Corona seek in the kitchen garden? She too, unknowing, was lonely. Unknowing, this child felt a need for children, companions. Uncle Copas's doll—well meant and priced at 1s. 3d.—had somehow missed to engage her affections. She could not tell him so, but she hated it.