Kitty's Enemy: The Boy Next Door
9781465682512
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
KITTY, fetch the rake from the tool-house, will you? "All right," responded Kitty; and dropping the fork with which she had been at work moving up the earth in her garden-plot, she hastened to do her brother's bidding. Kitty and Bob Glanville were "putting in a morning gardening," as Bob would have expressed it. They were both enthusiastic gardeners, and had been allotted a few yards each in the long strip of ground which stretched at the back of the semi-detached villa in the small provincial town where they lived. And it being the Easter holidays—it was at the end of April—they had plenty of time to devote to tilling their respective garden-plots, and were enjoying their labours in anticipation of the fine show of flowers they would have later on from the seeds which they were now sowing. Kitty, who was a nice-looking little girl of ten years old, with blue eyes and fair, curly hair, was two years her brother's junior, and being extremely good-natured she allowed him to order her about, and rarely thought of refusing to do his will. Bob was very fond of his sister; but he presumed on his seniority in many ways and expected always to take the lead. Kitty having procured the rake returned with it to her rother. "Bob," she said, "there's a boy next door—at Mr. Shuttleworth's." "I know," Bob answered laconically. "I saw him arrive yesterday with a big portmanteau. He came in a cab with Mr. Shuttleworth." "Then you may depend Mr. Shuttleworth met him at the station." Mr. Shuttleworth was an elderly bachelor of studious habits, who lived next door. Being of a reserved disposition he had little to do with his neighbours, though sometimes he exchanged a few words with Mr. and Mrs. Glanville if they happened to be in their front garden when he was in his, and he always nodded to the children when he met them. Neither Kitty nor Bob remembered Mr. Shuttleworth ever having had a visitor before, and they had lived next door to him for several years now. "Bob, I wonder who the boy can be," said Kitty, as her brother took the rake from her hand. "I saw him watching us from Mr. Shuttleworth's dining-room window. Such a very ugly-looking boy he is, with red hair, and green goggly eyes, and a snub nose, and a big mouth. He grinned at me."
