e in cold water; put on her dark red serge which
had been "good" last year; and went down-stairs to help her mother.

She could see it all as she went--all she was to do. There was the
threadbare blanket they used for a silence cloth, and the table-cloth
with the red stain by Johnny's place where he had spilled cranberry
jelly the night before last, when the cloth was "span clean." There
were the places to set, as always, with the same old dishes and the
same old knives and forks; and with the mechanical precision born of
long practice she would rightly place, without half looking at them,
the various napkins each in its slightly different wooden ring. The
utmost variety that she could hope for would be hot gingerbread instead
of the last of Sunday's layer-cake, and maybe frizzled beef, since they
had finished Sunday's roast in a meat pie this noon.

"I didn't hear you come in," said her mother as Mary Alice opened the
sitting-room door, "and I was listening for you."

"I went right up-stairs to change my things," said Mary Alice, hoping
that would end the matter.

"That's what I knew you must have done when it got to be six o'clock
and I didn't hear you. I could hardly wait for you to come. I've such
a surprise for you."

Mary Alice could hardly believe her ears. "A surprise?" she echoed,
incredulously.

"Yes. I got a letter this afternoon from your dear godmother."

"Oh!" Mary Alice's tone said plainly: Is that all? She had her own
opinion of her godmother, whom she had not seen since she was a small
child, and it was not an enthusiastic one. Her name--which she
hated--was her godmother's name. And aside from that, all she had ever
got from her godmother was an occasional letter and, on Christmas and
birthdays, a handkerchief or turnover collar or some other such trifle
as could come in an envelope from Europe where her godmother lived.

Even in the matter of a godmother, it seemed, it was Mary Alice's luck
to have one without any of the fairy powers. For although Mary Alice's
mother had dearly loved, in her girlhood, that friend for whom she had
called her first baby, she had always to admit, to Mary Alice's eager
questioning, that the friend was neither beautiful nor rich nor gifted.
She was a "spinster person" and years ago some well-to-do friend had
taken her abroad for company. And there she had stayed; while the
friend of her girlhood, whose baby was called for her, heard from her
but desul