"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."