THE ROBIN WHO SHOWED THE WAY She looked at the key quite a long time.

She turned it over and over, and thought about it.

As I have said before, she was not a child who had been trained to ask permission or consult her elders about things.
All she thought about the key was that if it was the key to the closed garden, and she could find out where the door was, she could perhaps open it and see what was inside the walls, and what had happened to the old rose-trees.

It was because it had been shut up so long that she wanted to see it.

It seemed as if it must be different from other places and that something strange must have happened to it during ten years.