“What?”
He lowered his voice and looked furtively over his shoulder. “A changeling! Sure as you’re born, Miss Leerie, I’m thinkin’ it’s one o’ them little black imps the fairies leave in place o’ the real child they’re after stealin’. I disremember if they have the likes o’ that in South America, but that’s my notion, just the same.”
Sheila O’Leary laughed inside and out. “Hennessy, you’re wonderful. And who but an Irishman would have thought of it! A changeling—a most changeable changeling! What’s the treatment?”
“A good brewin’ of egg-shells—goose egg-shells if ye have ’em, hens’ if ye haven’t. But don’t ye be laughin’; ’tis a sign o’ black doin’s, an’ laughin’ might bring bad luck on ye.”
Sheila sobered. “We’ll brew egg-shells. Now hurry home to Marm and coax her hard, Hennessy.”
Because Sheila O’Leary invariably had her way among the many who loved and believed in her, and because Hennessy and Marm Hennessy were numbered conspicuously among these, Sheila and her adopted moved early the following morning into the diminutive and immaculate house of Hennessy, with a vine-covered porch in front and a hen-yard in the rear. And that night there was a plentiful brew of egg-shells on the kitchen stove, done in the most approved Irish fashion, with the atom near by to inhale the fumes.
“Maybe ’twill work, an’ then again maybe ’twon’t.” Hennessy looked anxious. “Magic, like anything else, often spoils in transportatin’.”
“Oh, it will work!” Sheila spoke with conviction. “And we’ll hope the señora’s letter won’t travel too fast.”
So the names of Sheila O’Leary and Francisco Enrique Manuel Machado y Rodriguez were crossed off the books of the sanitarium, and the gossips saw them no more. Only Doctor Fuller and Peter Brooks sought them out in their new quarters, the doctor to attend professionally, Peter to attend to the dictates of a persistent heart. Never a day went by that he did not find his feet trailing the dust on the road to the house of Hennessy, and Sheila dropped into the habit of watching for him from the vine-covered porch at a certain time every afternoon. The picture of the best nurse at the sanitarium sitting in a little old rocker with the brown atom kicking and crowing on her lap, and looking down the steps with eyes that seemed to grow daily more luminous, came to be an accepted reality to both Peter and the doctor—as much of a reality as the reaching out of the atom’s small tendril-like fingers to curl about one’s thumb or to cling to one’s watch-charm.
“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?”