"Get down and pray to the Maria," commanded Sheila. "Promise her that if she will give your baby back to you you will take care of him for ever and ever. Never neglect him, never shake nor slap him, never give him bad milk to make him sick. Promise you'll always love him and keep him laughing and pretty. And remember--break your promise, let anything happen to Pancho again, and Maria will not give him back to you another time."
The sanitarium never learned in detail how Señor Machado became reconciled to a live son, not being present when the news was conveyed to him. They saw him arrive, however, looking very much shaken with his bereavement, and they saw him depart with his son perched high upon his shoulder, wearing the expression of one who has come unexpectedly into a great possession, while the señora clung to them both. The sanitarium waved them off with gladness and satisfaction--all but four unsmiling outsiders. So great a hole can a departing atom sometimes leave behind that those four who had given him temporary care and guardianship went about for days with sorrow written plainly upon them. Hennessy fed the swans in bitter silence; Peter moped, with a laugh for no one; Doctor Fuller groaned whenever South America was mentioned; while all three knew they could not even fathom the deepness or the bigness of that hole for Sheila.
Peter took her for a twilight ride in his car the first empty night. "Go on and cry it out--I sha'n't mind," he urged as he speeded the car along a country road.
Sheila smiled faintly. "Thank you--can't. Just feel bruised and banged all over--feel as if I needed a plunge in that old pool of Bethesda."
They spun on in silence for a few miles more before Sheila spoke again. "I learned one wonderful thing from Pancho--something I never felt sure of before."
"Sorry--can't tell. It's the sort of thing you tell only the man you marry, after you've discovered he's the only man you ever could have married."
Peter speeded the car ahead and smiled quietly into the gathering darkness. Fortunately he was not an impatient man.
There is one point concerning the atom that Hennessy and Doctor Fuller still wrangle over, neither of them having the slightest conception of the other's point of view.