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SHEILA
13

"Cleveland!" I exclaimed. "But I don't like to see you go so far away."

"Shure, an' I'll be all right, Mem, wi' me sisther an' me brither. He's talkin' of comin' over too, the little wan, the plumber by thrade. Me and the sisther'll be buyin' his passage belike. Me sisther says there do be a fine situation waitin' on me."

The invincible confidence of youth was dancing in her eye. Adventure lay before her and she held out both arms to it. "It is but natural," I said to myself, and yet I could not help feeling solicitude on her behalf. It wasn't a city I had been picturing as Sheila's manifest destiny, but one of those little, comfortable-looking houses that grow in such abundance on the outskirts of Toronto, where the storks call often, and where thrifty young couples growing in wisdom and worldly possession add substantial increase to the general sum of happiness.

If as a marginal decoration to this picture I had added some inheritance on my own part, of Sheila's future, an extra hand at dinner parties, or during the orgy of spring cleaning, it was merely, I hope, by way of filling out the color scheme. Such vicarious under-studies,