sounded the dinner-bell in the stately halls of Costello, before any
member of the family saw fit to respond to it.

Then they all came at once, with a sudden pounding of young feet on
the stairs, an uproar of young voices, and much banging of doors.
Jim and Danny, twins of fourteen, to whom their mother was wont
proudly to allude as "the top o' the line," violently left their own
sanctum on the fourth floor, and coasted down such banisters as lay
between that and the dining-room. Teresa, an angel-faced twelve-
year-old in a blue frock, shut 'The Wide, Wide World' with a sigh,
and climbed down from the window-seat in the hall.

Teresa's pious mother, in moments of exultation, loved to compare
and commend her offspring to such of the saints and martyrs as their
youthful virtues suggested. And Teresa at twelve had, as it were,
graduated from the little saints, Agnes and Rose and Cecilia, and
was now compared, in her mother's secret heart, to the gracious
Queen of all the Saints. "As she was when a little girl," Mrs.
Costello would add, to herself, to excuse any undue boldness in the
thought.

And indeed, Teresa, as she was to-night, her blue eyes still clouded
with Ellen Montgomery's sorrows, her curls tumbled about her hot
cheeks, would have made a pretty foil in a picture of old Saint
Anne.

But this story is about Alanna of the black eyes, the eight years,
the large irregular mouth, the large irregular freckles.

Alanna was outrunning lazy little Leo--her senior, but not her match