"Then some woman that has no child of her own to care for ought to adopt her, and relieve you of the responsibility. It's a shame and disgrace the way these New York women with no natural ties of their own go around crying for something to do, when there are sweet little children like this suffering for a mother's care. I'd adopt her myself if I was able to. I certainly would." "I'm perfectly willing to give over the technical part of her bringing up to some one of the women whom you so feelingly describe," Collier Pratt said. "The trouble is to find the woman--the right woman. The vicarious mother is not the most prevalent of our modern types, I regret to say." 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 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.