The little girl on the couch stirred softly, and the hand that Nancy was holding, a pathetic, thin, unkempt little hand, grew warm in hers. The lids of the big eyes fluttered and lifted. Nancy looked into their clouded depths for an instant. Then she turned to Collier Pratt decisively.
“I’ll take care of your little girl for you, if you will let me,” she said.
CHAPTER IX
Sheila
“I had mal de mer when I was on the steamer,” the child said, in her pretty, painstaking English—she spoke French habitually. “I do not like to have it on the land. The gentleman in there,” she pointed to the room beyond where Gaspard was again distressfully sleeping the sleep of the spent after a period of the most profound physical agitation, “he does not like to have it, too,—I mean either.”
Nancy had propped the little girl up on improvised pillows made of coats and wraps swathed in towels and covered her with some strips of canton flannel designed to use as “hushers” under the table covers. As soon as the intense discomfort and nausea that had followed the first period of faintness had passed, Nancy had slipped off the shabby satin dress, made like the long-sleeved kitchen apron of New England extraction, and attired the child in a craftily simulated night-gown of table 135 linen. Collier Pratt had worked with her, deftly supplementing all her efforts for his little girl’s comfort until she had fallen into the exhausted sleep from which she was only now rousing and beginning to chatter. Her father had left her, still sleeping soundly, in Nancy’s care, and gone off to keep an appointment with a prospective picture buyer. He had made no comment on Nancy’s sudden impulsive offer to take the child in charge, and neither she nor he had referred to the matter again.
“Are you comfortable now, Sheila?” Nancy asked. She had expected the child to have a French name, Suzanne or Japonette or something equally picturesque, but she realized as soon as she heard it that Sheila was much more suitable. The cloudy blue-black hair, and steel-blue eyes, the slight elongation of the space between the upper lip and nose, the dazzling satin whiteness of the skin were all Irish in their suggestion. Was the child’s mother—that other natural protector of the child, who had died or deserted her—Nancy tried not to wonder too much which it was that she had done,—an Irish girl, or was Collier Pratt himself of that romantic origin?
“Oui, Mademoiselle, I mean, yes, thank you. I do not think I will say to you Miss Martin. We only say their names like that to the people with whom we are not intime. We are intime now, aren’t we, now that I have been so very sick chez vous? In Paris the concierge had a daughter that I called Mademoiselle Cherie, and we were very intime. I think I would like to call you Miss Dear in English after her.”