"He says," cried Mabel, bursting in excitedly, "that sixty cents is the regular price in the daytime, but it's forty cents for a night message. It seems kind of mean to wake folks up in the middle of the night just to save twenty cents, doesn't it?"
"Yes," said Bettie. "I couldn't be impolite enough to do that to anybody I like as well as I like Mr. Black. If we haven't money enough to send a daytime message, we mustn't send any."
"Well, we haven't," said Jean. "We've only thirty-five cents."
"And we wouldn't have had that," said Mabel, "if I hadn't remembered that wall paper just in the nick of time."
Strangely enough, not one of the girls thought of the money in the bank. Perhaps it did not occur to them that it would be possible to remove any portion of their precious seven dollars and a half without withdrawing it all; they knew little of business matters. Nor did they think of appealing to their parents for aid at this crisis. Indeed, they were all too dazed by the suddenness and tremendousness of the blow to think very clearly about anything. The sum needed seemed a large one to the girls, who habitually bought a cent's worth of candy at a time from the generous proprietor of the little corner shop. Mabel, the only one with an allowance, was, to her father's way of thinking, a hopeless little spendthrift, already deeply plunged in debt by her unpaid fines for lateness to meals.
The Tucker income did not go round even for the grown-ups, so of course there were few pennies for the Tucker children. Marjory's Aunty Jane had ideas of her own on the subject of spending-money for little girls—Marjory did not suspect that the good but rather austere woman made a weekly pilgrimage to the bank for the purpose of religiously depositing a small sum in her niece's name; and, if she had known it, Marjory would probably have been improvident enough to prefer spot cash in smaller amounts. Only that morning tender-hearted Jean had heard patient Mrs. Mapes lamenting because butter had gone up two cents a pound and because all the bills had seemed larger than those of the preceding month—Jean always took the family bills very much to heart.
The girls sorrowfully concluded that there was nothing left for them to do but to obey Mr. Downing. They had looked forward with dread to giving up the cottage when winter should come, but the idea of losing it in midsummer was a thousand times worse.
"We'll just have to give it up," said grieved little Bettie. "There's nothing else we can do, with Mr. Black away. When I go home tonight I'll write to him and apologize for not being able to keep our promise about the dinner party. That's the hardest thing of all to give up."
"But you don't know his address," objected Jean.
"Yes, I do, because Father wrote to him about some church business this morning, before going away, and gave Dick the letter to mail. Of course Dick forgot all about it and left it on the hall mantelpiece. It's probably there yet, for I'm the only person that ever remembers to mail Father's letters—he forgets them himself most of the time."