Kitabı oku: «Таинственный сад / The Secret Garden. B1», sayfa 4

But just then she heard men’s voices in the hall.

‘How sad!’ said one. ‘That beautiful woman!’

‘There was a child too, wasn’t there?’ said the other. ‘Although none of us ever saw her.’

Mary was standing in the middle of her room when they opened the door a few minutes later. The two men jumped back in surprise.

‘My name is Mary Lennox,’ she saidcrossly. ‘I was asleep when everyone was ill, and now I’m hungry.’

‘It’s the child, the one nobody ever saw!’ said the older man to the other. ‘They’ve all forgotten her!’

‘Why was I forgotten?’ asked Mary angrily. ‘Why has nobody come to take care of me?’

The younger man looked at her very sadly. ‘Poor child!’ he said. ‘You see, there’s nobody left alive in the house. So nobodycan come.’

In this strange and sudden way Mary learnt that both her mother and her father had died. The few servants who had not died had run away in the night. No one had remembered little Miss Mary. She wasall alone.

Because she had never known her parents well, she did not miss them at all. She only thought of herself, as she had always done.

‘Where will I live’ she wondered. ‘I hope I will stay with people who’ll let me do what I want.’

At first she was taken to an English family who had known her parents. She hated their untidy house and noisy children, and preferred playing by herself in the garden. One day she was playing her favourite game, pretending to make a garden, when one of the children, Basil, offered to help.