Mabel followed obediently. When the forlorn pair reached the kitchen, Marjory announced her intention of exploring the little shed for empty baskets, leaving Mabel to stack the cups and plates in compact piles.

Mabel, without knowing just why she did it, picked up her old friend, the cracked lemonade-pitcher and gave it a little shake. Something rattled. Mabel, always an inquisitive young person, thrust her fingers into the dusty depths to bring up a piece of money--two pieces--three pieces--four pieces.

"Oh," she gasped, "it's my lemonade money! Oh, what a lucky omen!

Girls!"

The next instant Mabel clapped a plump, dusty hand over her own lips to keep them from announcing the discovery, and then, stealthily concealing the twenty cents in the pocket that still contained the wall-paper money, she stole quickly through the cottage and ran to her own home.

CHAPTER 16

Mabel Plans a Surprise

The girls were indignant later when they discovered Mabel's apparent desertion. It was precisely like Mabel, they said, to shirk when there was anything unpleasant to be done. For once, however, they were wronging Mabel--poor, self-sacrificing Mabel, who with fifty-five cents at her disposal was planning a beautiful surprise for her unappreciative cottage-mates. The girls might have known that nothing short of an ambitious project for saving the cottage from the Milligans would have kept the child away when so much was going on. For Mabel was at that very moment doing what was for her the hardest kind of work; all alone in her own room at home she was laboriously composing a telegram.

She had never sent a telegram, nor had she even read one. She could not consult her mother because Mrs. Bennett had inconsiderately gone down town to do her marketing. Dr. Bennett, however, was a very busy man and sometimes received a number of important messages in one day. Mabel felt that the occasion justified her studying several late specimens which she resurrected from the waste-paper basket under her father's desk.

These, however, proved rather unsatisfactory models since none of them seemed to exactly fit the existing emergency. Most of them, indeed, were in cipher.

"I suppose," said Mabel, nibbling her penholder thoughtfully, "they make 'em short so they'll fit these little sheets of yellow paper, but there's lots more space they _might_ use if they didn't leave such wide margins. I'll write small so I can say all I want to, but, dear me, I can't think of a thing to say."

It took a long time, but the message was finished at last. With a deep sigh of satisfaction, Mabel folded it neatly and put it into an envelope which she carefully sealed. Then, putting on her hat, and taking the telegram with her, she ran to Bettie's home and opened the door--none of the four girls were required to ring each other's doorbells. There, sure enough, was the letter waiting to be mailed to Mr. Black. Mabel, who had thought to bring a pencil, copied the address in her big, vertical handwriting, and without further ado ran with it to her friend, the telegraph operator, whose office was just around the corner. All the distances in the little town were short, and Mabel had frequently been sent to the place with messages written by her father, so she did not feel the need of asking permission.

The clerk opened the envelope--Mabel considered this decidedly rude of him--and proceeded to read the message. It took him a long time. Then he looked from Mabel's flushed cheeks and eager eyes to the little collection of nickels and dimes she had placed on the counter. Mabel wondered why the young man chewed the ends of his sandy mustache so vigorously. Perhaps he was amused at something; she looked about the little office to see what it could be that pleased him so greatly, but there seemed to be nothing to excite mirth. She decided that he was either a very cheerful young man naturally, or else he was feeling joyful because the clock said that it was nearly time for luncheon.

"It'll be all right, Miss Mabel," said he at last. "It's a pretty good fifty-five cents' worth; but I guess Mr. Black won't object to that. I hope you'll always come to me when you have messages to send."

"I won't if you go and read them all," said Mabel, at which her friend looked even more cheerful than he had before.

Ten minutes later Mabel, mumbling something about having had an errand to attend to, presented herself at the cottage. Beyond a few meekly received reproaches from Marjory, no one said anything about the unexplained absence. Indeed, they were all too busy and too preoccupied to care, the greater grief of losing the cottage having swallowed up all lesser concerns.

At a less trying time the girls would have discovered within ten minutes that Mabel was suffering from a suppressed secret; but everything was changed now. Although Mabel fairly bristled with importance and gave out sundry very broad hints, no one paid the slightest attention. Gradually, in the stress of packing, the matter of the telegram faded from Mabel's short memory, for preparing to move proved a most exciting operation, and also a harrowing one. Every few moments somebody would say: "Our last day," and then the other three would fall to weeping on anything that happened to come handy. Of course the packing had stirred up considerable dust; this, mingled with tears, added much to the forlornness of the cottagers' appearance when they went home at noon with their news.

The parents and Aunty Jane said it was a shame, but all agreed that there was nothing to be done. All were sorry to have the girls deprived of the cottage, for the mothers had certainly found it a relief to have their little daughters' leisure hours so safely and happily occupied.

Mabel's mother was especially sorry.

Never was moving more melancholy nor house more forlorn when the moving, done after dark with great caution, and mostly through the dining-room window on the side of the house farthest from the Milligans, was finally accomplished. The Tucker boys had been only too delighted to help. By bedtime the cottage was empty of everything but the curtains on the Milligan side of the house. An hour later the tired girls were asleep; but under each pillow there was a handkerchief rolled in a tight, grimy little ball and soaked with tears.

In the morning, the girls returned for a last look, and for the remaining curtains. Dandelion Cottage, stripped of its furniture and without its pictures, showed its age and all its infirmities. Great patches of plaster and wall paper were missing, for the gay posters had covered a multitude of defects. The indignant Tucker boys had disobeyed Bettie and had removed not only the tin they had put on the leaking roof, but the steps they had built at the back door, the drain they had found it necessary to place under the kitchen sink, and the bricks with which they had propped the tottering chimneys.

Before the day was over, the tenants whom the Milligans had found for their own house were clamoring to move in, so the Milligans took possession of the cottage late that afternoon, getting the key from Mr.

Downing, into whose keeping the girls had silently delivered it that morning. To do Mr. Downing justice, nothing had ever hurt him quite as much as did the dignified silence of the three pale girls who waited for a moment in the doorway, while equally pallid Jean went quietly forward to lay the key on his desk. He realized suddenly that not one of them could have spoken a word without bursting into tears; and for the rest of that day he hated himself most heartily.

CHAPTER 17

Several Surprises Take Effect

Mr. Black opened the door of his hotel apartment in Washington one sultry noon in response to a vigorous, prolonged rapping from without.

The bellboy handed him a telegram. When Mr. Black had read the long message he smiled and frowned, but cheerfully paid the three dollars and forty-one cents additional charges that the messenger demanded.

It was Mabel's message; the clerk had transmitted it faithfully, even to the two misspelled words that had proved too much for the excited little writer. If the receiving clerk had not considerately tucked in a few periods for the sake of clearness, there would have been no punctuation marks, because, as everybody knows, very few telegrams _are_ punctuated; but Mabel, of course, had not taken that into consideration.

It was quite the longest message and certainly the most amusing one that Mr. Black had ever received. It read:

"DEAR MR. BLACK,

"We are well but terribly unhappy for the worst has happened.

Cant you come to the reskew as they say in books for we are really in great trouble because the Milligans a very unpolite and untruthful family next door want dandelion cottage for themselves the pigs and Mr. Downing says we must move out at once and return the key our own darling key that you gave us.

We are moving out now and crying so hard we can hardly write. I mean myself. Is Mr. Downing the boss of the whole church. Cant you tell him we truly paid the rent for all summer by digging dandelions. He does not believe us. We are too sad to write any more with love from your little friends

"JEAN MARJORY BETTIE AND I.

"P. S. How about your dinner party if we lose the cottage?"

Mr. Black read and reread the typewritten yellow sheet a great many times; sometimes he frowned, sometimes he chuckled; the postscript seemed to please him particularly, for whenever he reached that point his deep-set eyes twinkled merrily. Presently he propped the dispatch against the wall at the back of his table and sat down in front of it to write a reply. He wrote several messages, some long, some short; then he tore them all up--they seemed inadequate compared with Mabel's.

"That man Downing," said he, dropping the scraps into the waste-basket, "means well, but he muddles every pie he puts his finger in. Probably if I wire him he'll botch things worse than ever. Dear me, it _is_ too bad for those nice children to lose any part of their precious stay in that cottage, now, for of course they'll have to give it up when cold weather comes. If I can wind my business up today there isn't any good reason why I can't go straight through without stopping in Chicago. It's time I was home, anyway; it's pretty warm here for a man that likes a cold climate."

Meanwhile, things were happening in Mr. Black's own town.

It was a dark, threatening day when the Milligans, delighted at the success of their efforts to dislodge its rightful tenants, hurriedly moved into Dandelion Cottage; but, dark though it was, Mrs. Milligan soon began to find her new possession full of unsuspected blemishes.

Now that the pictures were down and the rugs were up, she discovered the badly broken plaster, the tattered condition of the wall paper, the leaking drain, and the clumsily mended rat-holes. She found, too, that she had made a grievous mistake in her calculations. She had supposed that the tiny pantry was a third bedroom; with its neat muslin curtains, it certainly looked like one when viewed from the outside; and crafty Laura, intensely desirous of seeing the enemy ousted from the cottage at any price, had not considered it necessary to enlighten her mother.

"My goodness!" exclaimed Mrs. Milligan, a thin woman with a shrewish countenance now much streaked with dust. "I thought you said there was a fine cellar under this house? It's barely three feet deep, and there's no stairs and no floor. It's full of old rubbish."

"I never was down there," admitted Laura, dropping a dishpanful of cooking utensils with a crash and hastily making for safe quarters behind a mountain of Milligan furniture, "but I've often seen the trap door."

"It hasn't been opened for years. And where's the nice big closet you said opened off the bedroom? There isn't a decent closet in this house.

I don't see what possessed you--"

"It serves you right," said Mr. Milligan, unsympathetically. "You wouldn't wait for anything, but had to rush right in. I told you you'd better take your time about it, but no--"

"You know very well, James Milligan," snapped the irate lady, "that the Knapps wouldn't have taken our house if they couldn't have had it at once."

"Well, I _don't_ know," growled Mr. Milligan, scowling crossly at the constantly growing heaps of incongruously mixed household goods, "where in Sam Hill you're going to put all that stuff. There isn't room for a cat to turn around, and the place ain't fit to live in, anyway."

Bad as things looked, even Mr. Milligan did not guess that first busy day how hopelessly out of repair the cottage really was; but he was soon to find out.

The summer had been an unusually dry one; so dry that the girls had been obliged to carry many pails of water to their garden every evening. The moving-day had been cloudy--out of sympathy, perhaps, for the little cottagers. That night it rained, the first long, steady downpour in weeks. This proved no gentle shower, but a fierce, robust, pelting flood. Seemingly a discriminating rain, too, choosing carefully between the just and the unjust, for most of it fell upon the Milligans. With the sole exception of the dining-room, every room in the house leaked like a sieve.

The tired, disgusted Milligans, drenched in their beds, leaped hastily from their shower baths to look about, by candlelight, for shelter. Mr.

Milligan spread a mattress, driest side up, on the dining-room floor, and the unfortunate family spent the rest of the night huddled in an uncomfortable heap in the one dry spot the house afforded.

Very early the next morning they sent post-haste for Mr. Downing.