the baby's father?"

"Realize it takes a month for a letter to reach that little South American
ant-hill? Write now if you want to, but let me be trying my way while the
letter is traveling."

"All right. But if it doesn't work--"

"It will. When my feelings about anything run all to the good this way,
I'd bank anything on them. Now please hurry."

So it came about that instead of a burial service that night Father
O'Friel conducted an original and unprecedented adoption ceremony. Without
even a witness the senora signed a paper which she showed no inclination
to read and which she would hardly have understood had she attempted it.
It was enough for her that she could give away Francisco Enrique Manuel
Machado y Rodriguez to a foolish nurse who was plainly anxious to be
bothered with him. Death had seemed the only release from an obligation
that exhausted and frightened her, and from which neither pleasure nor
personal pride could be obtained. But this was another way mercifully held
out to her, and she accepted it with gratitude and absolute belief.
Eagerly she agreed to the conditions Sheila laid down; the father was to
be notified and forced to make a life settlement on the atom; in the mean
time she was to remain at the sanitarium, pay all expenses, and interfere
in no way with the nurse or the baby. So desirous was she to display her
gratitude that she heaped the atom's wardrobe--lace, ribbons, and
embroidery--upon Sheila, and kissed the hem of Father O'Friel's cassock.

"_Que gracioso--que magnifico!_" Then she yawned behind her tinted nails.
"I have ver' much the sleep. I find anothaire room and make what you
call--_la cama_." At the door she turned and cast a farewell look upon the
blanketed bundle. "Eet look ver' ugly--all the same I theenk eet die."

It took barely ten minutes for word of the adoption to reach Doctor
Fuller, and it brought him running. "Good Lord! Leerie, are you crazy? Did
you think I pulled you out of bed to-night to start an orphan-asylum? What
do you mean, girl?"

Sheila looked down at her newly acquired possession, and for the first
time that night the strange, luminous look that was all her own, that had
won for her her nickname of Leerie, crept into her eyes; they fairly
dazzled the old doctor with their shining. "Honestly, don't know myself.
Still testing out my feelings in my think laboratory."

"You can't raise that baby and keep on with your nursing. Too much
responsibility