he same."

"Know it! Needn't rub it in! Wasn't going to!" Sheila raised a wet face,
with red-rimmed eyes and lips that trembled outrageously. She couldn't
steady them to save her, and so she let them tremble while she stuttered
forth her last protest. "Didn't think for a moment I wouldn't give him
back, d-d-did you? That was my plan--my way. I wanted Father O'Friel to
let me try--t-t-t-thought all along he'd grow into such an ad-d-d-dorable
mite his m-m-m-mother'd be wanting him back. What I didn't count on was my
wanting to k-k-keep him." Sheila swallowed hard. She wanted to get rid of
that everlasting choke in her throat. When she spoke again her voice was
steadier. "But I tell you one thing. She doesn't get him without fighting
for him. She's going to fight for him as I fought that night in the
sanitarium, and you're going to help me keep her fighting. Understand?
Then perhaps when she gets him she'll have some faint notion of how
precious a baby can be." With a more grim expression than any of the three
had ever seen on her usually luminous face, Sheila O'Leary shouldered the
atom and disappeared within the house.

The three men stood by her while Hennessy guarded the house. For the rest
of the day the senora, backed by the business office and a procession of
interested sympathizers, stormed the parish house and demanded to see the
paper that she had signed. They stormed Doctor Fuller's office and
demanded his co-operation, or at least what information he had to give.
They consulted the one lawyer in the town and three others within car
distance, but their advice availed little, inasmuch as Father O'Friel had
refused to give up the paper until the baby's father arrived, and they
could get no intelligent idea from the senora of how legal the adoption
had been made. By keeping perfectly dumb the three were able to hold the
crowd in abeyance, and the senora, looking anything but a bird of
paradise, came back to them again and again to weep, to plead, to bribe.

The excitement held until midnight, an unprecedented occurrence for the
sanitarium. It was still dark the next morning when Hennessy was roused
from the haircloth sofa in the hall, where he was still keeping guard, by
the fumbling of a hand on the door-knob. "Who's there?" roared Hennessy.

"Please--eet ees me--the Senora Machado y Rodriguez."

"Go 'way! Shoo-oo!" Hennessy banged the door with his fist as he always
banged the bread-platter to scatter the swan