“For Sheila.”
“Oh!”
Mrs. Vickery cast up her eyes and stole out, not knowing what to say. Already the child was turning his affections away from home and her.
An hour later she almost stepped on him again. He was lying on the rug by the twilight-glimmering window of the dining-room, whither Dorothy’s relentless scales had driven him. He was lying on his stomach with his nose almost touching his composition-book, and he was scrawling large words laboriously with a nub of pencil so stubby that he seemed to be writing with his own forefinger bent like a grasshopper’s leg.
William Shakespeare, Gent., sleeping in Avon church, had no knowledge of what conspiracy was hatching against his long-enough prestige. And if he had known, that very human mind of his might have suspected the truth, that the inspiration of his new rival was less a desire to crowd an old gentleman from the top shelf of fame than to supplant him in the esteem of a certain very young woman.
Shakespeare himself in that same kidnapped play of his called “Hamlet” complained of the children’s theater that rivaled his own.
There was complaint now of the new children’s theater in the minor city of Braywood. Three homes were topsy-turvied by the insatiable, irrepressible mummers.
CHAPTER III
It was less than an hour after Sheila had left Mrs. Vickery’s when Mrs. Jerrems was on the telephone, plaintively demanding, “Who on earth is this Kemble child?”
Mrs. Vickery told her what she knew, and Mrs. Jerrems sighed: “A stage-child! That explains everything. She’s got Tommy simply bewitched.”