"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."