CHAPTER V

Returning Rosa Marie

EARLY the next morning, Jean, needing her thimble to sew on a vitally necessary button, ran to the supposedly empty cottage to get it. Taking the short cut through the Tuckers' back yard she found Bettie feeding Billy, the seagull, one of Bob's numerous pets.

"Billy always wakes everybody up crying for his breakfast," explained thoughtful little Bettie. "Bob's spending a week at the Ormsbees' camp, so I have to get up to feed Billy so father can sleep."

"Why don't the other boys do it?"

"Mercy! _They'd_ sleep through anything. Going to the Cottage?"

"Yes, come with me," returned Jean, "while I get my thimble. It's so big that it almost takes two to carry it."

"All right," laughed Bettie, crawling through the hole in the fence.

Jean's thimble was a standing joke. A stout and prudent godmother had bestowed a very large one on the little girl so that Jean would be in no danger of outgrowing the gift. Jean was now living in hopes of sometime growing big enough to fit the thimble.

"Why!" exclaimed Jean, after a brief search, "the key isn't under the doormat! Where do you s'pose it's gone?"

"Here it is in the door. But how in the world did it get there? I locked that door myself last night and tucked the key under the mat. I _know_ I did."

"I saw you do it," corroborated Jean.

"Perhaps Marjory's inside."

"It isn't Mabel, anyway. She's always the last one up."

"Mercy me!" cried Bettie, who had been peeking into the different rooms to see if Marjory were inside. "Come here, Jean. Just look at this!"

"This" was brown little Rosa Marie sitting up in the middle of the pink and white spare-room bed, like, as Bettie put it, a brown bee in the heart of a rose. Her small dark countenance was absolutely expressionless, so there was no way of discovering what _she_ thought about it all.

"My sakes!" exclaimed Jean, with indignation, "that lazy Mabel never took her home, after all! Why! We'll have a whole band of wild Indians coming to scalp us right after breakfast! How _could_ she have been so careless. This is the worst she's done yet."

"But it's just like Mabel," said Bettie, giving vent, for once, to her disapproval of Mabel's thoughtlessness. "She likes things ever so much at first. Then she simply forgets that they ever existed."

"Who forgets?" demanded Mabel, bouncing in at the front door.

"You," returned Jean and Bettie, with one accusing voice.

"Prove it."

"You forgot to take Rosa Marie home last night."

"I never did. I took her every inch of the way home, stayed with her all alone in the dark for pretty nearly a _year_, and then had to bring her all the way back again, walking in her sleep. So there, now!"

"But why in the world didn't you leave her with her own folks?"

"Her horrid mother wasn't there. And between 'em, I didn't get any supper and only a little sleep."

"But what are you going to do?" queried astonished Jean.

"After she drinks this quart of milk," explained Mabel, "I'm going to take her home again."

"Where did you get so much milk?" asked Bettie, suspiciously.

Mabel colored furiously. "I begged it from the milkman," she confessed. "That's why I'm up so early. I've been sitting on our kitchen doorstep for two hours, waiting for him to come."

Mabel spent all that day industriously returning Rosa Marie to a home that had locked its doors against her. No pretty, dark, French mother stood in the doorway. No tall, dark man wandered about the yard. No neighbor came from the tumbling houses across the street to explain the woman's puzzling absence.

It proved a most tiresome day. Mabel was not only mentally weary from trying to solve the mystery, but physically tired also from dragging Rosa Marie up and down the hill between Dandelion Cottage and the child's deserted home. The girls went with her once, but, having satisfied their curiosity as to Rosa Marie's abiding-place, turned their attention to pleasanter tasks. Walking with Rosa Marie was too much like traveling with a snail. One such journey was enough.

Moreover, Mabel's pride had suffered. A grinning boy, looking from plump Mabel's ruddy countenance to fat Rosa Marie's expressionless brown one, had asked wickedly:

"Is that your sister? You look enough alike to be twins."

After that, Mabel feared that other persons might mistake the small brown person for a relative of hers, or, worse yet, mistake her for an Indian.

"Goodness me!" groaned Mabel, toiling homeward from her second trip, "it was hard enough to borrow a baby, but it's enough sight worse getting rid of one afterwards. There's one thing certain; I'll _never_ borrow another."

Late in the day Mabel thought of Mrs. Malony, the egg-woman. Perhaps she would know what had become of Rosa Marie's vanished mother. Dropping Rosa Marie inside the gate, Mabel knocked at Mrs. Malony's door.

"The folks that lived in the shanty beyant?" asked Mrs. Malony. "Sure, darlint, nobody's lived there for years and years save gipsies and tramps and such like."

"But day before yesterday--no, yesterday morning--I saw a young Frenchwoman----"

"A black-eyed gal wid two long braids and wan small Injin? Sure, Oi know the wan you mane. Her man, Injin Pete, died a month ago, some two days after they come to the shack."

"But where is she now?" asked Mabel.

"Lord love ye," returned Mrs. Malony, "how wud Oi be after knowin'? She came and she wint, like the rest av thim."

"There was a man--not a gentleman and not exactly a tramp--talking to her yesterday. Perhaps you know where _he_ is. I couldn't find _anybody_."

"Depind upon it," said Mrs. Malony, easily, "she's gone wid him. She's Mrs. Somebody Else by now, and good riddance to the pair av thim."

"But," objected Mabel, drawing the branches of a small shrub aside and disclosing Rosa Marie sprawling on the ground behind it, "she left her baby."

"The Nation, she did!" gasped Mrs. Malony, for once surprised out of her serenity. "Wud ye think of thot, now!"

"I've _been_ thinking of it," returned Mabel, miserably. "And I don't know what in the world to do. You see, she left the baby with _me_."

"Take her home wid ye," advised Mrs. Malony, hastily; so hastily that it looked as if the Irishwoman feared that _she_ might be asked to mother Rosa Marie. "I'll kape an eye on the shack for ye. If that good-for-nothin' black-haired wan comes back, Oi'll be up wid the news in two shakes of a dead lamb's tail, so Oi will. In the mane toime, be a mother to thot innocent babe yourself. She needs wan if iver a choild did."

"I've been that for two whole days now," groaned Mabel.

"Thot's right, thot's right," encouraged Mrs. Malony. "Ye were just cut out for thot same. Good luck go wid ye."

Rosa Marie spent a second night in the spare room of Dandelion Cottage. She, at least, seemed utterly indifferent as to her fate.