Maida thought hard for a moment.  Then she burst into laughter, although the big round tear-drops were still hanging from the tips of her lashes.  “There was a whole drawerful here when I first came.  I remember now I thought it was waste stuff and threw it all away.”

Rosie laughed too.  “The tamarinds you can get from the man who comes round with the wagon.  Mrs. Murdock used to make her own apples-on-the-stick, mollolligobs and corn-balls.  I’ve helped her many a time.  Now I’ll write you a list of stuff to order from the grocer.  I’ll come round after school and we’ll make a batch of all those things.  To-night you get Billy to print a sign, ’apples on the stick and mollolligobs to-day.’  You put that in the window to-morrow morning and by to-morrow night, you’ll be all sold out.”

“Oh, Rosie,” Maida said happily, “I shall be so much obliged to you!”

Rosie was as good as her word.  She appeared that afternoon wearing a long-sleeved apron under the scarlet cape.  It seemed to Maida that she worked like lightning, for she made batch after batch of candy, moving as capably about the stove as an experienced cook.  In the meantime, Maida was popping corn at the fireplace.  They mounted fifty apples on skewers and dipped them, one at a time, into the boiling candy.  They made thirty corn-balls and twenty-five mollolligobs, which turned out to be round chunks of candy, stuck on the end of sticks.

“I never did see such clever children anywhere as there are in Primrose Court,” Maida said that night with a sigh to Granny.  “Rosie told me that she could make six kinds of candy.  And Dicky can cook as well as his mother.  They make me feel so useless.  Why, Granny, I can’t do a single thing that’s any good to anybody.”

The next day the shop was crowded.  By night there was not an apple, a corn-ball or a mollolligob left.

“I shall have a sale like this once a week in the future,” Maida said.  “Why, Granny, lots and lots of children came here who’d never been in the shop before.”

And so what looked like serious trouble ended very happily.

Trouble number three was a great deal more serious and it did not, at first, promise to end well at all.  It had to do with Arthur Duncan.  It had been going on for a week before Maida mentioned it to anybody.  But it haunted her very dreams.

Early Monday morning, Arthur came into the shop.  In his usual gruff voice and with his usual surly manner, he said, “Show me some of those rubbers in the window.”

Maida took out a handful of the rubbers—­five, she thought—­and put them on the counter.  While Arthur looked them over, she turned to replace a paper-doll which she had knocked down.

“Guess I won’t take one to-day,” Arthur said, while her back was still turned, and walked out.

When Maida put the rubbers back, she discovered that there were only four.  She made up her mind that she had not counted right and thought no more of the incident.