“Mrs. McCall says we mustn’t—nor you mustn’t come over here.”
“I don’t care,” began Mabel, but Tess broke in cheerfully, with:
“Oh, let’s keep on using the make-believe telephone. And let’s make believe the river’s in a flood between us, and the bridges are all carried away, and——”
“No! I won’t play that way,” cried Mabel, passionately, and with a stamp of her foot. “I want you to come over here.”
“You’re mean things—there now! I never did like you, anyway. I want you to play in my yard——”
“_I’ll_ come over and play with you,” interposed a cool, sweet voice, and there was Lillie Treble, looking just as angelic as she could look.
“Oh, Lillie!” gasped Tess. But Mabel broke in with:
“Come on. There’s a loose picket yonder. You can push it aside. Come on over here, little girl, and we’ll have a good time. I never did like those stuck-up Kenway girls, anyway.”
Lillie turned once to give Tess and Dot the full benefit of one of the worst grimaces she could possibly make. Then she joined the Creamer girl in the other yard. She remained over there all the morning, and for some reason Mabel and Lillie got along very nicely together. Lillie could be real nice, if she wanted to be.
That afternoon Mabel did not appear in her yard and Lillie wandered about alone, having sworn eternal enmity against Tess and Dot. The next morning Mrs. Creamer put her head out of an upstairs window of the cottage and told Mrs. McCall, who chanced to be near the line-fence between the two places, that Mabel had “come down” with the measles, after all the precautions they had taken with her.
“It’s lucky those two little girls over there didn’t come into our yard to play with her,” said Mrs. Creamer. “The other young ones are just beginning to get around, and now Mabel will have to have a spell. She always was an obstinate child; she couldn’t even have measles at a proper and convenient time.”
Mrs. Treble, meantime, was feeling herself more and more at home in the old Corner House. She did not offer to help in the general housework in the least, and did nothing but “rid up” her own room. There could be nothing done, or nothing talked of in the family, that Mrs. Treble was not right there to interfere, or advise, or change, or in some way “put her oar in,” as Agnes disrespectfully said, to the complete vexation of the person most concerned.