Kitabı oku: «Таинственный сад / The Secret Garden. B1», sayfa 11

Just then she noticed arobin singing to her from a tree on the other side of a wall. ‘I think that tree’s in the secret garden!’ she told herself. ‘There’s an extra wall here, and there’s no way in.’

She went back to where the gardener wasdigging, and spoke to him. At first he answered in a very bad-tempered way, but suddenly the robin flew down near them, and the old man began to smile. He looked a different person then, and Mary thought how much nicer people looked when they smiled. The gardener spoke gently to the robin, and the pretty little bird hopped on the ground near them.

‘He’s my friend, he is,’ said the old man. ‘There aren’t any otherrobins in the garden, so he’s a bit lonely.’ He spoke in strong Yorkshire dialect, so Mary had to listen carefully to understand him.

She looked very hard at therobin. ‘I’m lonely too,’ she said. She had not realized this before.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked the gardener.

‘Ben Weatherstaff. I’m lonely myself. Therobin’s my only friend, you see.’

‘I haven’t got any friends at all,’ said Mary.

Yorkshire people always say what they are thinking, and old Ben was a Yorkshiremoor man. ‘We’re alike, you and me,’ he told Mary. ‘We’re not pretty to look at, and we’re both very disagreeable.’

Nobody had ever said this to Mary before. ‘Am I really as ugly anddisagreeable as Ben?’ she wondered.

Suddenly therobin flew to a tree near Mary and started singing to her. Ben laughed loudly.