"Oh, I've already met the hotel," Mabelle laughed. "Bill—Mr. Bowers took me there to dinner this evening while we were waiting for you to come home."
"Aw, chuck that 'Mr. Bowers,'" Bill interrupted. "I'm plain Bill to everybody in this town, and I guess Jap's sister can call me that."
"The hotel, as I was saying," Jap resumed, "will have to take care of you for the present till you can get a bathroom attachment for the cottage. It'll probably be lonely for you, just at first."
"I'll see to it that Mabelle meets all the best people in town," Bill offered.
The temporary housing problem settled, they returned to the discussion of repairs necessary and repairs superfluous. After two hours of parley, Jap consented to let his energetic sister work her will on Flossy's cottage. It was after midnight when the girl had been established in her room at the hotel, and Jap and Bill tumbled into bed. The shank of that night had wrought miracles for unsuspecting Bloomtown. A vision of blue eyes, red lips and golden tresses kept floating through Bill's dreams, a vision that bore not the least resemblance to Rosy Raymond. Meanwhile Jap stalked through one dream controversy after another with plumbers, painters and the other defilers of Flossy's home.
By noon on Monday Mabelle had Bloomtown by the ears, and by the end of the week it was all up with Bill. Jap had to hire a boy to help get out the Herald. It consumed all of Bill's time threatening and cajoling merchants into the prompt delivery of supplies, and seeing to it that the workmen were on the job when Mabelle arrived at the cottage in the morning. Bloomtown carpenters, paper hangers and plumbers usually took their own sweet time. They had a great awakening when Mabelle employed them. With Bill to pour oil on the troubled waters, strikes were narrowly averted.
One morning, soon after the radiant one arrived, Kelly Jones wandered into the office, where a lively dispute with the boss plumber was under way. In ten minutes, Kelly had fallen a victim to the little tyrant.
"'Tain't no use talkin' about her gittin' along without a cellar," he confided to Jap. "I'll dig it myself, and that'll save all this row about how the pipes is got to run. I ain't got nothin' much to do, now the corn's all in. And it's lucky we ain't had a hard freeze. The ground's fine for diggin'," and the following morning he was on the job.
For two months Bloomtown was demoralized. A cellar made possible a furnace, and the elimination of stoves called for a fireplace in the living-room, a fireplace framed in by soft blue and yellow tiles. One by one Mabelle added her receipted bills to the packet of documents that would go into the making of that mortgage on Jap's property. One by one the housewives of Bloomtown demanded of their paralyzed husbands bathrooms, cellars, furnaces, tiled fireplaces.
At last the agony was over. A load of furniture had arrived from the city, and Bill, as usual, left his stickful of type and hastened to superintend the transfer of it from the freight depot to the cottage. The evening shadows were lengthening in the office when he returned. Jap had gone up-stairs to get out a rush order on the job press, and there was a little commotion on the stairway just before Bill presented himself, his brown eyes full of trouble. Jap looked at him, and his heart sank. Had it come to this? Mabelle, in spite of her scanty years, was older than Bill. She must have known. The whole town knew.