"Loving little cuss," muttered Peter one afternoon. "Can you tell me how any mother under the sun could resist those eyes or the clutch of those brown paws?"
"Don't forget one point," Sheila spoke quietly; "he wasn't a loving little cuss then."
"He'll go down on the books as my pet case," chuckled the doctor. "Four pounds in four weeks! Think of it, on a whole-milk formula!"
Hennessy wagged his head knowingly at Sheila, and when they had gone he snorted forth his contempt for professional ignorance. "Milk! Fiddlesticks! Sure a docthor don't know everything. 'Twas the egg-shells that done it, an' Marm an' me can bear witness he quit the scratchin' an' began the smilin' from that very hour. Look at him now! Can ye deny it, Miss Leerie?"
"I'm not wanting to, Hennessy." Whereupon Sheila proved the matter by reducing the atom to squeals of joy while she retold the old history of the pigs with the aid of five little brown toes.
Between Peter and Hennessy, Sheila came into possession of many facts concerning the señora. Her dresses and her jewels were the talk of the sanitarium. She applied herself diligently to all beautifying treatments and the charming of susceptible young men. Presumably life to her meant only a continuous process of adorning herself and receiving admiration. So she spent her days dressing and basking in the company of a dozen different swains, and the atom cast no annoying shadow on her pathway.
August came, and the atom discovered his legs. Sheila disregarded the lace and ribbons with a sigh of relief and took to making rompers. They were adorable rompers with smocking and the palest of pink collars and belts. The licorice sticks had changed to a rich olive brown and had assumed sufficient rotundity to allow of pink-and-white socks and white ankle-ties. In all the busy years of her nursing Sheila had never had time for anything like this; she had never had a baby for longer than a week or two at a time. Just as she was beginning to feel her individual share in them they had all gone the way of properly parented offspring, and never had she sewed a single baby dress. She gloried in the lengths of dimity and poplin, in the intricacies of new stitches and embroidery. And Peter, watching from a step on the porch, gloried in the picture she made.