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. Be­sides that, if she liked it she could go into it ev­ery day and shut the door be­hind her, and she could make up some play of her own and play it quite alone, be­cause no­body would ever know where she was, but would think the door was still locked and the key buried in the earth. The thought of that pleased her very much.