The breeze continued to play in her hair. Birds hopped upon the grass. Someone down the road was using a lawn mower. Gradually the feeling of having been jolted and shaken by some rude force began to pass from Kay, and she was just reaching the stage where, re-establishing connection with her sense of humour, she would be able to look upon the amusing side of the recent scramble, when from somewhere between earth and heaven there spoke a voice.
“Oo-oo!” said the voice.
Kay was puzzled. Though no ornithologist, she had become reasonably familiar with the distinctive notes of such of our feathered chums as haunted the garden of San Rafael, and this did not appear to be one of them.
“I see you,” proceeded the voice lovingly. “How’s your pore head, dearie?”
The solution of the mystery presented itself at last. Kay raised her eyes and beheld, straddled along a branch almost immediately above her, a lean, stringy man of ruffianly aspect, his naturally unlovely face rendered additionally hideous by an arch and sentimental smile. For a long instant this person goggled at her, and she stared back at him. Then, with a gasp that sounded confusedly apologetic, he scrambled back along the branch like an anthropoid ape, and dropping to earth beyond the fence, galloped blushingly up the garden.
Kay sprang to her feet. She had been feeling soothed, but now a bubbling fury had her in its grip. It was bad enough that outcasts like Sam Shotter should come and camp themselves next door to her. It was bad enough that they should annoy her uncle, a busy man, with foolish questions about what she had been like as a child and whether she had ever done her hair differently. But when their vile retainers went to the length of climbing trees and chirruping at her out of them, the situation, it seemed to her, passed beyond the limit up to which a spirited girl may reasonably be expected to endure.
She returned to the house, fermenting, and as she reached the hall the front doorbell rang.
Technically, when the front doorbell of San Rafael rang, it was Claire Lippett’s duty to answer it; but Claire was upstairs making beds. Kay stalked across the hall, and having turned the handle, found confronting her a young woman of spectacular appearance, clad in gorgeous raiment and surmounted by a bird-of-paradise-feathered hat so much too good for her that Kay’s immediate reaction of beholding it was one of simple and ignoble jealousy. It was the sort of hat she would have liked to be able to afford herself, and its presence on the dyed hair of another cemented the prejudice which that other’s face and eyes had aroused within her.
“Does a guy named Shotter live here?” asked the visitor. Then, with the air of one remembering a part and with almost excessive refinement, “Could I see Mr. Shotter, if you please?”
“Mr. Shotter lives next door,” said Kay frostily.