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_."