cracks over and under the doors and around the windows; and by lying very flat on the dining-room floor and peering under the baseboards, one could easily see what was happening in the next yard. These, and other defects, would surely make the little house uninhabitable in winter; but while the unexpectedly extended summer lasted, the Cottagers were rejoicing over every pleasant moment of weather and praying hard for other pleasant moments.

Of all the games played in Dandelion Cottage, the one called "Mother" was the most popular. To play it, it was necessary, first of all, to divide the house into four equal parts. As there were five rooms, this division might seem to offer no light task; but, by first subtracting the kitchen, it was possible to solve this difficult mathematical problem to the Cottagers' entire satisfaction.

But of course one can't play "Mother" without possessing a family. The Cottagers solved this problem also. Bettie's home could always be counted on to furnish at least two decidedly genuine babies and Jean could always borrow a perfectly delightful little cousin named Anne Halliday; but Marjory and Mabel, to their sorrow, were absolutely destitute of infantile relatives. Mabel was the chief sufferer. Sedate Marjory, plausible of tongue, convincing in manner, could easily accumulate a most attractive family at very short notice by the simple expedient of borrowing babies from the next block; but nowhere within reasonable reach was there a mother willing to intrust her precious offspring a second time to heedless Mabel.

"Now, Mabel," Mrs. Mercer would say, when Mabel pleaded to have young Percival for her very own for just one brief hour, "I'd really like to oblige you, but it's getting late in the season, you are not careful enough about doors and windows and the last time you borrowed Percival you brought him home with a stiff neck that lasted three days."

"But I did remember to return him," pleaded Mabel.

"Do you sometimes forget?" queried Mrs. Mercer, with interest.

"I did twice," confessed always honest Mabel; "but truly I don't see how I can help it when babies sleep and sleep and sleep the way those two did. You see, I made a bed for Gerald Price on the lowest-down closet shelf, and he was so perfectly comfortable that he thought he was asleep for all night."

"What about the other time?"

"That was Mollie Dixon. But then, I had five children that day and only one bed. Mollie slipped down in the crack at the back—she's awfully thin—and I never missed her until her mother came after her. That was rather a bad time [Mabel sighed at the recollection] for Mrs. Dixon found the Cottage locked up for the night and poor little Mollie crying under the bed."

"Mabel! And you want to borrow my precious Percival!"

"But it couldn't happen again," protested Mabel, earnestly. "Bettie says that I'm just like lightning; I never strike twice in the same place. That's the reason I get into so many different kinds of scrapes. I'll be ever so careful, though, if you'll let me borrow Percival just this one time."

Mrs. Mercer, however, refused to part with Percival. Other mothers, approached by pleading Mabel, refused likewise to intrust their babies to her enthusiastic but heedless keeping. They knew her too well.

"The thing for you to do," suggested Marjory, ostentatiously washing the perfectly clean faces of the four delightful small persons that she had been able, without any trouble at all, to borrow in Blaker Street, "is to find a mother that really wants to get rid of her children."

"Yes," said Bob Tucker, who had dropped in to deliver the basket of apples that Mrs. Crane had sent to her former neighbors, "you ought to advertise for the kind of mother that feeds her babies to crocodiles. Perhaps some of them have emigrated to this country and sort of miss the Ganges River."

"You might try the orphan asylum," offered Jean, as balm for this wound. "It's only four blocks from here."

"I have," returned Mabel, dejectedly. "I went there early this morning."

"What happened?" demanded Bettie, who had just arrived with a little Tucker under each arm.

"They said they'd let them go 'permanently to responsible parties.' I didn't know just exactly what that meant, so I said: 'Does that mean that you'll lend me a few for two hours?'"

"And would they?"

"Well, they didn't. They said I'd better borrow a Teddy bear."

"How mean," said sympathetic Bettie. "Nevermind, I'll lend you Peter, this time."

"Say," queried Mabel, after she had accepted Bettie's proffered brother, "what does 'permanently' mean?"

"For keeps," explained Jean.

"What are 'responsible parties'?"

"Jean and Bettie and I," twinkled Marjory, "but not you."

"That's good," laughed Bob, who, like Marjory, loved to tease. "But never mind, Mabel. After you've practised a year or two on Peter, who's a nuisance if there ever was one, you'll find yourself growing respons—— Whoop! What was that?"

"That" was a sudden crash that resounded through the house. Everybody rushed to the kitchen. The big dish-pan that Mabel had left on the edge of the kitchen table was upside down on the floor. At least half of little Peter Tucker was under it. But the half that remained outside was so unmistakably alive that nobody felt very seriously alarmed—except Peter.

"Thank goodness!" said Mabel, removing the pan, "this is just a little Tucker and not any Percival Mercer! Cheer up, Peter. You're not as wet as you think you are. There wasn't more than a quart of water in that pan and it was almost perfectly clean."

And Peter, soothed by Mabel's reassuring tone, immediately cheered up.

CHAPTER II
Rosa Marie

NOT long after Mabel's ineffectual attempt to borrow an orphan Mrs. Bennett dispatched her small daughter to Lake Street to find out, if possible, why Mrs. Malony, the poultry woman, had failed to send the week's supply of fresh eggs.

Now, the way to Mrs. Malony's was most interesting, particularly to a young person of observing habits. There were houses on only one side of the street and most of those were tumbling down under the weight of the sand that each rain carried down the hillside. But the opposite side of the road was even more attractive, for there one had a grassy, shrubby bank where one could pick all sorts of things off bushes and get burrs in one's stockings; a narrow stretch of pebbled beach where one could sometimes find an agate, and a wide basin of very shallow water where one could almost—but not quite—step from stone to stone without wetting one's feet. It was certainly an enjoyable spot. The distance from Mabel's home to Mrs. Malony's was very short—a matter of perhaps five blocks. But if a body went the longest way round, stopped to scour the green bank for belated blackberries, prickly hazelnuts, dazzling golden-rod or rare four-leaved clovers; or loitered to gather a dress-skirtful of stony treasures from the glittering beach, going to Mrs. Malony's meant a great deal more than a five blocks' journey.

Just a little beyond the poultry woman's house, on the lake side of the straggling street, a small, but decidedly attractive point of land jutted waterward for perhaps two hundred feet. On this projecting point stood a small shanty or shack, built, as Mabel described it later, mostly of knot-holes. She meant, without knowing how to say it, that