Rosamond would not have a nursery maid; she “would not give up her baby to anybody;” neither would she let a “kitchen girl” into her paradisiacal realm of shining tins, and top-over cups, and white, hemmed dishcloths.

“Let’s have a companion!” said Dorris.  “Let’s afford her together.”

When their “Christian Register” came, that very week, there was Dot Ingraham’s advertisement.

Mr. Kincaid went into the city, and round to Pilgrim Street, and found her; and now, in this November when every machine girl in Boston was thrown back upon her savings, or her friends, or the public contribution, she was tucking up little short dresses for Stephen, whom Rosamond, according to the family tradition, called resolutely by his name, and whom she would, at five months old, put into the freedom of frocks, “in which he could begin to feel himself a little human being, and not a tadpole.”

Dot helped in the kitchen, too; but this was a home kitchen.  She became one of themselves, for whatever there was to be done.  Especially she took triumphant care of Rosamond’s stand of plants, which, under her quickly recognized touch and tending, rushed tumultuously into a green splendor, and even at this early winter time, showed eager little buds of bloom, of all that could bloom.

They had books and loud reading over their work.  Everything got done, and there were leisure hours again.  Dot earned four dollars a week, and once a fortnight went home and spent a Sunday with her mother.

All went blessedly at the Horse Shoe; but there is not a Horse Shoe everywhere.  It is always a piece of luck to find one.

Desire Ledwith knew that; so she held her peace about it for a while, among these girls to whom Bel Bree was preaching her crusade.  All they knew was that Dot Ingraham and her machine were gone away into a family eighteen miles from Boston.

“If you find anything for me to do, Miss Ledwith, I’ll do it,” said Kate Sencerbox.  “But I won’t go into one of those offices, nor off into the country for the winter.  I want to keep something to hold on to,—­not run out to sea without a rope.”

Desire did not propose advertising, as she had done to Dot; she would let Kate wait a week.  A week in the new condition of things might teach her a good deal.

CHAPTER XXVI.

TROUBLE AT THE SCHERMANS’.

There was trouble in Mrs. Frank Scherman’s pretty little household.

The trouble was, it did not stay little.  Baby Karen was only six weeks old, and Marmaduke was only three years; great, splendid fellow though he was at that, and “galumphing round,”—­as his mother said, who read nonsense to Sinsie out of “Wonderland,” and the “Looking Glass,”—­upon a stick.

Of course she read nonsense, and talked nonsense,—­the very happiest and most reckless kind,—­in her nursery; this bright Sin Scherman, who “had lived on nonsense,” she declared, “herself, until she was twenty years old; and it did her good.”  Therefore, on physiological principles, she fed it to her little ones.  It agreed with the Saxon constitution.  There was nothing like understanding your own family idiosyncrasies.