But the señora still clung. "I no shake babee now. I love babee now. Please--please--his pa-pa come. You give heem back?"
Sheila unclasped the señora's hands, turned the atom's carriage about, and deliberately wheeled him away.
Out of the lobby to the sidewalk she was pursued by pleading cries, expostulating reproofs, as well as actual particles of the crowd itself, the Reverend Mr. Grumble, the wife of one of the trustees, a handful of protesting patients, following to urge the rights of the prostrated mother. But Sheila refused to be held back or argued with; stoically she kept on her way. When she reached the little vine-covered porch only Peter, Father O'Friel, and Doctor Fuller remained as escort.
"You can't keep him, Leerie. You've got to give him up." The old doctor spoke sorrowfully but firmly.
"It was only a mock adoption, and you promised if she ever wanted him back she should have him," Father O'Friel reminded her.
"She's his mother, after all," Peter put in, lamely.
At that Sheila exploded. "You men make me tired! 'She's his mother, after all.' After all what? Cruelty, neglect, heartlessness, hoping he would die--glad to be rid of him! That's about all the sense of justice you have. Let a woman weep and call for her baby, and every man within earshot would hand him over without considering for a moment what kind of care she would give him. Oh, you--make--me--sick!" Sheila buried her face in the nape of Pancho's neck.
Doctor Fuller, who had always known her, who had stood by her in her disgrace when she had been sent away from the sanitarium three years before and had believed in her implicitly in spite of all damning evidence, who had fought for her a dozen times when she had called down upon her head the wrath of the business office, looked now upon her silent, shaking figure with open-mouthed astonishment. In all those years he had never seen Leerie cry, and he couldn't quite stand it.
"There, there, child! We understand--we're not quite the duffers you make us out. Of course, by all rights, human and moral, the little shaver belongs to you, but you can't keep him, just the 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.