Gertrude Costello was not yet three months old, her mother said.

“Well, she can have number one, anyway!” said the mayor.  “You make a rejooced rate for one family, I understand, Miss Costello?”

“I don’t!” chuckled Alanna, locking her thin little arms about his neck, and digging her chin into his eye.  So he gave her full price, and she went off with her mother in a state of great content, between rows and rows of coffins, and cases of plumes, and handles and rosettes, and designs for monuments.

“Mrs. Church will want some chances, won’t she, mother?” she said suddenly.

“Let Mrs. Church alone, darlin’,” advised Mrs. Costello.  “She’s not a Catholic, and there’s plenty to take chances without her!”

Alanna reluctantly assented; but she need not have worried.  Mrs. Church voluntarily took many chances, and became very enthusiastic about the desk.

She was a pretty, clever young woman, of whom all the Costellos were very fond.  She lived with a very young husband, and a very new baby, in a tiny cottage near the big Irish family, and pleased Mrs. Costello by asking her advice on all domestic matters and taking it.  She made the Costello children welcome at all hours in her tiny, shining kitchen, or sunny little dining-room.  She made them candy and told them stories.  She was a minister’s daughter, and wise in many delightful, girlish, friendly ways.

And in return Mrs. Costello did her many a kindly act, and sent her almost daily presents in the most natural manner imaginable.

But Mrs. Church made Alanna very unhappy about the raffled desk.  It so chanced that it matched exactly the other furniture in Mrs. Church’s rather bare little drawing-room, and this made her eager to win it.  Alanna, at eight, long familiar with raffles and their ways, realized what a very small chance Mrs. Church stood of getting the desk.  It distressed her very much to notice that lady’s growing certainty of success.

She took chance after chance.  And with every chance she warned Alanna of the dreadful results of her not winning, and Alanna, with a worried line between her eyes, protested her helplessness afresh.

“She will do it, Dad!” the little girl confided to him one evening, when she and her book and her pencil were on his knee.  “And it worries me so.”

“Oh, I hope she wins it,” said Teresa, ardently.  “She’s not a Catholic, but we’re praying for her.  And you know people who aren’t Catholics, Dad, are apt to think that our fairs are pretty—­pretty money-making, you know!”

“And if only she could point to that desk,” said Alanna, “and say that she won it at a Catholic fair.”

“But she won’t,” said Teresa, suddenly cold.

“I’m praying she will,” said Alanna, suddenly.

“Oh, I don’t think you ought, do you, Dad?” said Teresa, gravely.  “Do you think she ought, Mommie?  That’s just like her pouring her holy water over the kitten.  You oughtn’t to do those things.”