But it was only a day later that Teresa and Alanna returned from school with faces filled with expressions of utter woe.  Indignant, protesting, tearful, they burst forth the instant they reached their mother’s sympathetic presence with the bitter tale of the day’s happenings.  Marg’ret Hammond’s father had come home again, it appeared, and he was awfully, awfully cross with Marg’ret and Joe.  They weren’t to come to the Costellos’ any more, or he’d whip them.  And Marg’ret had been crying, and they had been crying, and Sister didn’t know what was the matter, and they couldn’t tell her, and the rehearsal was no fun!

While their feeling was still at its height, Dan and Jimmy came in, equally roused by their enforced estrangement from Joe Hammond.  Mrs. Costello was almost as much distressed as the children, and excited and mutinous argument held the Costello dinner-table that night.  The Mayor, his wife noticed, paid very close attention to the conversation, but he did not allude to it until they were alone.

“So Hammond’ll take no favors from me, Mollie?”

“I suppose that’s it, Frank.  Perhaps he’s been nursing a grudge all these weeks.  But it’s cruel hard on the children.  From his comin’ back this way, I don’t doubt he’s out of work, and where Marg’ret’ll get her white dress from now, I don’t know!”

“Well, if he don’t provide it, Tess’ll recite the salutation,” said the Mayor, with a great air of philosophy.  But a second later he added, “You couldn’t have it finished up, now, and send it to the child on the chance?”

His wife shook her head despondently, and for several days went about with a little worried look in her bright eyes, and a constant dread of the news that Marg’ret Hammond had dropped out of the exhibition.  Marg’ret was sad, the little girls said, and evidently missing them as they missed her, but up to the very night of the dress rehearsal she gave no sign of worry on the subject of a white dress.

Mrs. Costello had offered her immense parlors for the last rehearsal of the chief performers in the plays and tableaux, realizing that even the most obligingly blind of Mother Superiors could not appear to ignore the gathering of some fifty girls in their gala dresses in the convent hall, for this purpose.  Alanna and Teresa were gloriously excited over the prospect, and flitted about the empty rooms on the evening appointed, buzzing like eager bees.

Presently a few of the nuns arrived, escorting a score of little girls, and briskly ready for an evening of serious work.  Then some of the older girls, carrying their musical instruments, came in laughing.  Laughter and talk began to make the big house hum, the nuns ruling the confusion, gathering girls into groups, suppressing the hilarity that would break out over and over again, and anxious to clear a corner and begin the actual work.  A tall girl, leaning on the piano, scribbled a crude programme, murmuring to the alert-faced nun beside her as she wrote: