Olly opened her wide hungry eyes in hopeful anticipation and nodded assent.
"A nice dolly, with real mamma," he continued, "who plays with it like a true baby. Would ye like to help her play with it?"
The idea of a joint partnership of this kind evidently pleased Olly by its novelty.
"Well then, brother Gabe will get you one. But Gracie will have to go away, so that the doll's mamma kin come."
Olly at first resented this, but eventually succumbed to novelty, after the fashion of her sex, starving or otherwise. Yet she prudently asked—
"Is it ever hungry?"
"It is never hungry," replied Gabriel, confidently.
"Oh!" said Olly, with an air of relief.
Then Gabriel, the cunning, sought Mrs. Dumphy, the mentally alienated.
"You are jest killin' of yourself with the tendin' o' that child," he said, after bestowing a caress on the blanket and slightly pinching an imaginary cheek of the effigy. "It would be likelier and stronger fur a playmate. Good gracious! how thin it is gettin'. A change will do it good; fetch it to Olly, and let her help you to tend it until—until—to-morrow." To-morrow was the extreme limit of Mrs. Dumphy's future.