Alene, that you pucker your brows over that ponderous tome?"

It was after supper, and Uncle Fred, seated in an easy chair beside the reading table in the library, was lazily puffing a pipe.

A stand near by held a large dictionary over whose pages Alene's head was bent.

Glancing up with a puzzled expression, she said: "I don't quite understand; this book says it means 'plain,' and I'm sure lots of children are quite ugly long before they are that age, and I don't think the girls are plain—Laura has lovely eyes and I never heard I was. Am I ugly, Uncle?"

"Well, one wouldn't pick you out in a crowd when all the lights were out, for a fright—"

"Oh, Uncle Fred, do be sober a minute!"

"Alene, I'm ashamed of you to hint that your guardian is ever anything else!"

"I mean grave!"

"A 'most potent, reverend and grave' old fellow am I!"

"Why, sometimes, Uncle Fred, you act as if you weren't any more than nine," said Alene, returning to the book with an air of tolerant resignation that amused the young man. He crossed to her side.

"Tell me what you are hunting; perhaps I can help you."

Alene ignored his air of exaggerated solemnity.

"You see, Laura said one must be twelve years old to be legible—to the Club, you know."

"Then if I'm not too old, I'm old enough to belong! But if I were you, I'd quit the L's and try something else very like it, with an E before," suggested Uncle Fred.

"Eligible, of course—how stupid of me!"

On the way upstairs that night Alene paused and gave way to a fit of laughter.

"What's the fun now?" called Uncle Fred from his cosy position by the table.

"It seems so funny to think that I," here came a series of mirthful sounds, "to think that you would think that I was afraid of you."

Uncle Fred's chair was overturned by his energetic uprising in pursuit of the little tease, who heeded the warning and was safely out of sight on the landing, with one parting giggle as the door of her room was shut with a resounding clap.

CHAPTER III

GUMDROPS

"Not a red gum drop was cast!" cried Laura as she jumped lightly from the garden wall and joined Alene, who for some time had been pacing the orchard impatiently with Prince jumping beside her.

Alene's look of pleased anticipation changed to dismay.

"I'm so sorry!"

"What for?"

"Why, Uncle Fred would have given me money to buy some, if I knew you wanted them!"

Laura's laugh rang out merrily.

"Why, Alene, it's votes! We don't buy them like 'lectioneers do—we get enough to give each member one red and one white gumdrop. Those who are for a candidate put in a white and those against her a red!"

Alene danced with joy.

"Then I'm elected!"

"You are now a member of the Happy-Go-Luckys and your name is duly inscribed on the books!" said Laura, in her judicial tone.

"And they all put in the white drops! How lovely of them!"

"Yes, all but Ivy; she put hers in her mouth to taste it, and before she knew, it was gone!"

"Dear me, and what did she do then?"

"She whispered it to me at the last minute, just after I got out the little mustard box where we cast our votes, and so I allowed her to put in a button instead. After it was over, some of us wanted to save the gumdrops for the first meeting you attended, but those greedy youngsters had devoured 'em all but two which I managed to keep."

Laura pressed into Alene's hand a small tinsel-paper package.

"You must eat half of each," said Alene, wisely surmising that it was Laura's own portion that had been saved, and resolving to leave for another day the blue ribbon-tied box of candy Uncle Fred had given her that morning, which she had just placed in the grass at the foot of a tree, awaiting Laura's arrival.

Seated on the green beneath the trees, they ate the gumdrops, whose scarcity perhaps made them seem the more delicious, and exchanged confidences concerning themselves and the Happy-Go-Luckys.

Alene, who was an only child, envied Laura's claim to two small sisters and a baby brother and one brother older than herself.

"Ivy is the only girl in the Bonner family."

"Like me!"

"Not quite—she has six brothers, four of them older than she is!"

"Gracious, I'd be lost in such a crowd of boys!"

As for the Club, it had formal meetings when an excursion to the woods or an exhibition was in view; then verbal notice was given to assemble at the home of one of the members. The other meetings were when two or more members met by chance or appointment for any object, whether study, play or conversation.

"So you see this is a meeting of two members, and I think I see a third," concluded the President, Miss Lee, craning her neck in the direction of the side street.

"Hello, Lol," cried a shrill voice, and Ivy's curly head peeped over the wall.

"I'll go and help her over," said Laura, rising quickly. As the wall was not very high, Alene idly wondered why such an active-looking girl should need assistance in scaling it.

"Why, I never dreamed she was lame," she murmured a moment later, swallowing something that seemed to choke her, when she saw Ivy coming forward on a pair of slender crutches. She strove to hide her emotion as she hurried down the grassy terrace to greet her.

Ivy may have noticed her start of surprise, for she said with a queer, unchildish laugh, as though she had read her thought:

"You didn't know I used these," with an expressive glance toward the crutches. "You see I kept 'em on the other side of the wall the other day. I wanted you to treat me as you would if I were like the rest, not handled gently and pitied!"

Alene tried to keep the pity from her countenance, for Ivy's words made her feel worse than ever. She wished she could run away somewhere, for a while, to have a good cry.

"Don't mind her, Alene! I do believe she talks that way to make us feel bad," said Laura in what Alene thought a very unfeeling manner; but she learned later that Laura's seeming harshness toward Ivy was only a cloak to hide her sympathy, and that it gave her an influence over the child who would otherwise use her infirmity to tyrannize over the others.

Ivy threw her crutches on the grass and sank down, saying,

"Horrid things! I hate them—and it makes me feel so mean to have to beg to get them back when the kids take 'em away from me!"

"Do they do that?" inquired Alene, indignantly.

"They have to do it sometimes, for she beats them with the crutches," explained Laura.

"That's the only way I can reach 'em!" said her friend, in self-defense.

Ivy was an elfin-looking creature with sparkling black eyes that seemed to see right through one; her small head was covered with a thick mop of curls of a blackness that, in some lights, had blue and green shades like the plumage of a bird; her wasted cheeks and brown, claw-like hands told pathetically of weary months on a sick-bed, which indeed she had only recently quitted, as Alene learned later.

"What a lovely sash you have on," she exclaimed, with a sudden change of mood, holding up an end of Alene's plaid sash. "It's like a baby rainbow stolen from a fairy sky and hung 'round your waist."

Alene glanced at her sash with a new interest. She cared little for pretty clothes and seldom noticed what those around her wore; that she was dressed finer and more fashionably than Laura and Ivy had not once occurred to her.

"That sounds like poetry," she observed.

"Yes, she writes poetry, too!" Laura returned proudly. "You must let Alene see some of it—and she keeps a book where she writes all about the sky when the sun sets—she sees lovely rivers and golden hills and ladies riding in skiffs—"

"Now, Lol!" cried Ivy with a hectic color reddening her cheeks. "It's just silly stuff, you know, that I