“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.
In addition, morning, noon and night she was forever dinning the fact into the ears of the girls, or Mrs. McCall, or Aunt Sarah, or Uncle Rufus, that her husband’s mother was Uncle Peter Stower’s own sister. “John Augustus Treble talked a lot about Uncle Peter—always,” she said. “I had a little property, when I married John Augustus. It was cash money left from my father’s life insurance.
“He wasn’t a very good business man, John Augustus. But he meant well,” she continued. “He took my money and started a little store with it. He took a lease of the store for three years. There was a shoe factory right across the street, and a box shop on one hand and a knitting mill on the other. Looked like a variety store ought to pay in such a neighborhood.
“But what happened?” demanded Mrs. Treble, in her most complaining tone. “Why, the shoe factory moved to Chicago. The box shop burned down. The knitting mill was closed up by the sheriff. Then the landlord took all John Augustus’ stock for payment of the rent.