“My—­what did you say?” said Alanna, very white.

“Your little buke,” said Annie.  She laid the chance book on the table, and proceeded to mend the fire.

Alanna sank back in her chair.  She twisted her fingers together, and tried to think of an appropriate prayer.

“Thank you, Annie,” she said weakly, when the laundress went out.  Then she sprang for the book.  It slipped twice from her cold little fingers before she could open it.

“Eighty-three!” she said hoarsely.  “Sixty—­seventy—­eighty-three!”

She looked and looked and looked.  She shut the book and opened it again, and looked.  She laid it on the table, and walked away from it, and then came back suddenly, and looked.  She laughed over it, and cried over it, and thought how natural it was, and how wonderful it was, all in the space of ten blissful minutes.

And then, with returning appetite and color and peace of mind, her eyes filled with pity for the wretched little girl who had watched this same sparkling, delightful fire so drearily a few minutes ago.

Her small soul was steeped in gratitude.  She crooked her arm and put her face down on it, and sank to her knees.

“New white dress, is it?” said Mrs. Costello in bland surprise.  “Well, my, my, my!  You’ll have Dad and me in the poorhouse!”

She had been knitting a pink and white jacket for somebody’s baby, but now she put it into the silk bag on her knee, dropped it on the floor, and with one generous sweep of her big arms gathered Alanna into her lap instead.  Alanna was delighted to have at last attracted her mother’s whole attention, after some ten minutes of unregarded whispering in her ear.  She settled her thin little person with the conscious pleasure of a petted cat.

“What do you know about that, Dad?” said Mrs. Costello, absently, as she stiffened the big bow over Alanna’s temple into a more erect position.  “You and Tess could wear your Christmas procession dresses,” she suggested to the little girl.

Teresa, apparently absorbed until this instant in what the young Costellos never called anything but the “library book,” although that volume changed character and title week after week, now shut it abruptly, came around the reading-table to her mother’s side, and said in a voice full of pained reminder: 

“Mother!  Every one will have new white dresses and blue sashes for Superior’s feast!”

“I bet you Superior won’t!” said Jim, frivolously, from the picture-puzzle he and Dan were reconstructing.  Alanna laughed joyously, but Teresa looked shocked.

“Mother, ought he say that about Superior?” she asked.

“Jimmy, don’t you be pert about the Sisters,” said his mother, mildly.  And suddenly the Mayor’s paper was lowered, and he was looking keenly at his son over his glasses.

“What did you say, Jim?” said he.  Jim was instantly smitten scarlet and dumb, but Mrs. Costello hastily explained that it was but a bit of boy’s nonsense, and dismissed it by introducing the subject of the new white dresses.