“I wish you wouldn’t bother about my conscience; it’s all right,” said Mary, rather crossly still, though in her heart she quite trusted the Cooies, and was delighted to go with them. “What shall I do with the basket?” she went on.
“Leave it here—on the path. It will be quite safe. You are close to the white gate, though you did not know it,” said Mr Coo. “Turn round.”
So Mary did, putting down her basket, and feeling rather like a big ship steered by a very small person at the helm. And sure enough, the tiny path, or passage rather, scarcely to be called a path, was there at her side, though she had not seen it when busy gathering the cones.
It seemed less of a scramble this time, and only a very few paces to go, before they were at the gate. Mary had no grey feather in her cap this time as an “open sesame,” and no need for one apparently, for the white gate opened of itself as soon as they reached it, “without the least fuss. I suppose it is because the Cooies are on my shoulders,” thought she.
And just as they got to the other gate the wood-pigeons hopped down, and actually, with their beaks, or feet, or somehow, pushed it open, without any difficulty, holding it back till Mary had passed through, when it gently closed.
The little girl stood still, looking round her in expectation of seeing the crowds of birds as before. But not one was there! The place, though lovelier that ever, she thought, as she glanced at the beautiful light, flickering and filtering through the interlacing bushes, and rested her eyes on the fresh green, and felt the soft warmth creeping caressingly round her, was quite deserted. And as she turned to her little friends in surprise, they answered, as now often happened, her unspoken question.
“No,” they said, “you will not meet any of our relations to-day. They are very busy elsewhere, as you will hear. But that will make it all the easier to show you the arbours you so much want to see.”
“Thank you,” said Mary, not sorry to hear this, for the crowds of birds had just a little worried her, and she was feeling rather stiff and tired with the cold and with stooping so much to pick up the cones.
“But in the first place,” said one of the Cooies—I think it was Mr Coo—“you must rest a little and get warm.”
He looked at her as he spoke, with his head on one side. He and Mrs Coo were not on her shoulders now, as I said, but on the ground a little in front of her. “You have not got on your new cloak to-day,” he said. “It would have kept you warm.”