ng figure up the shady street, there came to him,
however, a sense of having something to work for at last.

"What was it Mrs. Caldwell once said?" he murmured to himself. "That
she wasn't wise enough to 'trim the wick of a star'? Yes, that was it.
Well," he added whimsically, "I don't suppose I'm fit for the job
either, but I'm going to undertake it. It'll be worth while staying
here--it'll be worth while living--if I can trim the wick of a star and
help it to shine!"

CHAPTER VI

There was nothing spectacular or startlingly precocious about Sheila's
development during the next few years.

On her seventeenth birthday, her frocks were lowered to her slender
ankles; on her eighteenth, she permanently assumed the dignity of full
length skirts; on her nineteenth, she lifted her hair from its soft,
girlish knot on her neck to a womanly coronet upon the top of her head.
But despite her regal coiffure, she remained very much of a child.

Mrs. Caldwell had achieved the apparently impossible; she had
eliminated the role of the "young lady" from Sheila's _repertoire_. At
nineteen the girl was ready, at the touch of fate, to merge the child
in the woman; but there was nothing of the conventional young lady
about her, though she led the same life as other girls in Shadyville, a
life that abounded in parties---in town through the winter and at the
country houses in the summer--and little sex vanities and love affairs.

Sheila herself had never had a love affair. She was a charming young
person--not quite pretty, but more alluring in her shy, wistful
fashion, than handsomer girls--so it followed that susceptible youths
sued for her favor. But they sued in vain. She smiled upon them until
they said some word of love, and then she was on the wing like a wild
bird.

Whatever ardor there was in her she had expended thus far upon her
ambition to write. Under Peter's restraining tutelage, she had long
since foresworn odes to the evening star for prose fantasies, and these
were in turn being superseded by what promised to become a clean-cut,
brilliant gift for narrative. She had a rich imagination, an unusual
facility for characterization, a certain quaint, whimsical humor--that
she never displayed in her speech; all of which raised her work, crude
though it still was, distinctly above the level of the commonplace.

She had recently sold a little sketch, in her later and better manner,
to an eastern magazine with a