Without even stopping to look in at his own office, the traveler went straight to the rectory to ask for Bettie. Bettie, Mrs. Tucker told him, he would probably find in the cottage yard.
Mr. Black took a short cut through the hole in the back fence, arriving on the cottage lawn just in time to meet a procession of girls entering the front gate. Each girl was carrying a huge, heavy clod of earth, out of the top of which grew a sturdy green plant; for the cottageless cottagers had discovered the only successful way of performing the difficult feat of restocking their garden with half-grown vegetables. Their neighbors had proved generous when Bettie had explained that if one could only dig deep enough one could transplant anything, from a cabbage to pole-beans. Some of the grown-up gardeners, to be sure, had been skeptical, but they were all willing that the girls should make the attempt.
"Oh, Mr. Black!" shrieked the four girls, dropping their burdens to make a simultaneous rush for the senior warden. "Oh! oh! oh! Is it really you? We're so glad—so awfully glad you've come!"
"Well, I declare! So am I," said Mr. Black, with his arms full of girls. "It seems like getting home again to have a family of nice girls waiting with a welcome, even if it's a pretty sandy one. What are you doing with all the real estate? I thought you'd all been turned out, but you seem to be all here. I declare, if you haven't all been growing!"
"We were—we are—we have," cried the girls, dancing up and down delightedly. "Mr. Downing made us give up the cottage, but he didn't say anything about the garden—and—and—we thought we'd better forget to ask about it."
"Tell me the whole story," said Mr. Black. "Let's sit here on the doorstep. I'm sure I could listen more comfortably if there were not so many excited girls dancing on my best toes."
So Mr. Black, with a girl at each side and two at his feet, heard the story from beginning to end, and he seemed to find it much more amusing than the girls had at any time considered it. He simply roared with laughter when Bettie apologized about Bob and the tin.
"Well," said he, when the recital was ended, and he had shown the girls Mabel's telegram, and the thoroughly delighted Mabel had been praised and enthusiastically hugged by the other three, "I have heard of cottages with more than one key. Suppose you see, Bettie, if anything on this ring will fit that keyhole."
Three of the flat, slender keys did not, but the fourth turned easily in the lock. Bettie opened the door.
"Possession," said Mr. Black, with a twinkle in his eye, "is nine points of the law. You'd better go to work at once and move in and get to cooking; you see, there's a vacancy under my vest that nothing but that promised dinner party can fill. The sooner you get settled, the sooner I get that good square meal. Besides, if you don't work, you won't have an appetite for a great big box of candy that I have in my trunk."