"Well, anyway," comforted Jean, "let's not worry about it. Let's rebuild our fire--of course it's out by now--and finish our cake."
In spite of the cake's turning out much better than anyone could have expected, with so many agitated cooks taking turns stirring it, there was something wrong with the day. The girls were filled with uneasy forebodings and could settle down to nothing. Marjory felt no desire to sing, and even the cake seemed to have lost something of its flavor. Moreover, when they had stood for a moment on their doorstep to see the new steam road-roller go puffing by, Laura had tossed her head triumphantly and shouted tauntingly: "_I_ know something _I_ shan't tell!" After that, the girls could not help wondering if Laura really did know something--some dreadful thing that concerned them vitally and was likely to burst upon them at any moment.
For the first time in the history of their housekeeping, they could find nothing that they really wanted to do. During the afternoon they had several little disagreements with each other. Mild Jean spoke sharply to Marjory, and even sweet-tempered Bettie was drawn into a lively dispute with Mabel. Moreover, all three of the older girls were inclined to blame Mabel for her fracas with the Milligans; and the culprit, ashamed one moment and defiant the next, was in a most unhappy frame of mind. Altogether, the day was a failure and the four friends parted coldly at least an hour before the usual time.
The next morning, Jean, with three large bananas as a peace offering, was the first to arrive at Dandelion Cottage. Jean, a wise young person for her years, had decided that a little hard work would clear the atmosphere, so, finding no one else in the house, she made a fire in the stove, put on the kettle, put up the leaf of the kitchen table, and began to take all the dishes from the pantry shelves. Dishwashing in the cottage was always far more enjoyable than this despised occupation usually is elsewhere, owing to the astonishing assortment of crockery the girls had accumulated. No two of the dishes--with the exception of a pair of plates bearing life-sized portraits of "The frog that would a-wooing go, whether his mother would let him or no"--bore the same pattern. There was a bewildering diversity, too, in the sizes and shapes of the cups and saucers, and an alarming variety in the matter of color. But, as the girls had declared gleefully a dozen times or more, it would be possible to set the table for seven courses when the time should come for Mr. Black's and Mrs. Crane's dinner party, because so many of the things almost matched if they didn't quite. Jean was thinking of this as she lifted the dishes from the shelf to the table, and lovingly arranged them in pairs, the pink sugar bowl beside the blue cream-pitcher, the yellow coffee cup beside the dull red Japanese tea cup, and the "Love-the-Giver" mug beside the "For my Little Friend" oatmeal bowl. She had just taken down the big, dusty, cracked pitcher that matched nothing else--which perhaps was the reason that it had remained high on the shelf since the day Mabel had used it for her lemonade--when the doorbell rang.