over the technical part of her bringing
up to some one of the women whom you so feelingly describe," Collier
Pratt said. "The trouble is to find the woman--the right woman. The
vicarious mother is not the most prevalent of our modern types, I
regret to say."

The little girl on the couch stirred softly, and the hand that Nancy
was holding, a pathetic, thin, unkempt little hand, grew warm in hers.
The lids of the big eyes fluttered and lifted. Nancy looked into their
clouded depths for an instant. Then she turned to Collier Pratt
decisively.

"I'll take care of your little girl for you, if you will let me," she
said.

CHAPTER IX

SHEILA

"I had _mal de mer_ when I was on the steamer," the child said, in her
pretty, painstaking English--she spoke French habitually. "I do not
like to have it on the land. The gentleman in there," she pointed to
the room beyond where Gaspard was again distressfully sleeping the
sleep of the spent after a period of the most profound physical
agitation, "he does not like to have it, too,--I mean either."

Nancy had propped the little girl up on improvised pillows made of
coats and wraps swathed in towels and covered her with some strips of
canton flannel designed to use as "hushers" under the table
covers. As soon as the intense discomfort and nausea that had
followed the first period of faintness had passed, Nancy had
slipped off the shabby satin dress, made like the long-sleeved
kitchen apron of New England extraction, and attired the child in a
craftily simulated night-gown of table linen. Collier Pratt had
worked with her, deftly supplementing all her efforts for his little
girl's comfort until she had fallen into the exhausted sleep from
which she was only now rousing and beginning to chatter. Her father
had left her, still sleeping soundly, in Nancy's care, and gone
off to keep an appointment with a prospective picture buyer. He had
made no comment on Nancy's sudden impulsive offer to take the child
in charge, and neither she nor he had referred to the matter again.

"Are you comfortable now, Sheila?" Nancy asked. She had expected the
child to have a French name, Suzanne or Japonette or something equally
picturesque, but she realized as soon as she heard it that Sheila was
much more suitable. The cloudy blue-black hair, and steel-blue eyes,
the slight elongation of the space between the upper lip and nose, the
dazzling satin whiteness of the skin were all Irish in thei