"Where in the world can we put the things?" asked Marjory, sitting up suddenly and displaying a blotched and swollen countenance very unlike her usual fair, rose-tinted face. "Of course we can each take our dolls and books home, but our furniture--"
"I'm going to ask Mother if we can't store it upstairs in our barn. I'm sure she'll let us."
"Oh, I _wish_ Mr. Black were here. It doesn't seem possible we've really got to move. There _must_ be some way out of it. Oh, Bettie, _couldn't_ we write to Mr. Black?"
"It would take too-oo-oo long," sobbed Bettie, sitting up and mopping her eyes with the muslin window curtain, which she could easily reach from the foot of the bed. "He's way off in Washington. Oh, dear--oh, dear--oh, dear!"
"Why couldn't we telegraph?" demanded Marjory, with whom hope died hard. "Telegrams go pretty fast, don't they?"
"They cost terribly," said Bettie. "They're almost as expensive as express packages. Still, we might find out what it costs."
"I dow the telegraph-mad," wheezed Mabel from the wash-basin. "I'll go hobe ad telephode hib ad ask what it costs--I've heard by father give hib bessages lots of tibes. Oh, by, by dose is all stuffed up."
"Try a handkerchief," suggested Jean. "Go ask, if you want to; it won't do any harm, nor probably any good."
Mabel ran home, taking care to keep her back turned toward the Milligan house. During her brief absence, the girls bathed their eyes and made sundry other futile attempts to do away with all outward signs of grief.
"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.