about.

* * * * *

Next door to Sally's Aunt Jane, in a cosy little cottage with a
wonderful little garden, lived Thomas Kitchener, a large, grave,
self-sufficing young man, who, by sheer application to work, had
become already, though only twenty-five, second gardener at the Hall.
Gardening absorbed him. When he was not working at the Hall he was
working at home. On the morning following Sally's arrival, it being a
Thursday and his day off, he was crouching in a constrained attitude in
his garden, every fibre of his being concentrated on the interment of a
plump young bulb. Consequently, when a chunk of mud came sailing over
the fence, he did not notice it.

A second, however, compelled attention by bursting like a shell on the
back of his neck. He looked up, startled. Nobody was in sight. He was
puzzled. It could hardly be raining mud. Yet the alternative theory,
that someone in the next garden was throwing it, was hardly less
bizarre. The nature of his friendship with Sally's Aunt Jane and old
Mr Williams, her husband, was comfortable rather than rollicking. It
was inconceivable that they should be flinging clods at him.

As he stood wondering whether he should go to the fence and look over,
or simply accept the phenomenon as one of those things which no fellow
can understand, there popped up before him the head and shoulders of a
girl. Poised in her right hand was a third clod, which, seeing that
there was now no need for its services, she allowed to fall to the
ground.