“Oh yes,” said Mary. “He knew it before he went away. He was very glad I was coming. He was sure I would be happy here. You see it is a little lonely sometimes at auntie’s when Michael’s away for such a long time. The little ones are so little.”
“Yet here you haven’t even little ones,” said her godmother, smiling. “How is it you are not lonely then?”
“I have you” said Mary, “and—and the forest, and you let me go about by myself. And I like the country much better than a town.”
“Even in winter?” asked Miss Verity.
Mary hesitated.
“Yes, I think so,” she said, “though the shops are very pretty about Christmas time, and the streets lighted up when it begins to get dark in the afternoons, do look so nice. But I daresay, godmother, here it is never dull or gloomy, even in winter. The forest must look lovely with snow on the branches, and shiny icicles, and I should think it’s always rather dry to walk about there, on the fir needles.”
“It is never wet for very long, certainly, in the forest,” said her godmother, “but still we have dull gloomy days, and days when it never leaves off raining at all, and one is glad to stay at home beside a bright cheery fire like this.”
Mary glanced at the fire again—the picture she had seen in it had melted or changed by this time, but in another corner she saw what seemed to her like a sort of arbour, with a bird at the entrance. This reminded her of the secret of the forest, and she wondered to herself what it was like inside the white gate on a dull rainy day such as Miss Verity had been speaking of. Was it always warm and bright there? Yes, she could not remember if the wood-pigeons had said so, but she felt sure it must be so.
“Otherwise,” she thought, “it would not be even the edge of fairy-land.”
Then her mind strayed to other things. She began wondering if she would soon have a letter from Michael, and if the picture in the fire could have been a sort of fairy message from him, and she quite started when her godmother spoke again.