The next night Eldon reached the theater in a new mood. He had been promoted. He still felt sorry for poor Tuell. The grief of the wife whom he had met at the train and taken to the undertaker’s shop where Tuell rested had torn his heart as with claws. He had told her all things beautiful of Tuell. He had wept to see her weep. He wept his heart clean as a sheep’s heart.  
As Villon said, “The dead go quick.” Eldon was ashamed to be so merciless, but in spite of himself ambition blazed up in him. He was a comedian. Batterson had told him so. The house had told him so. Sheila had murmured, “You’re splendid.”
 
And now he was a comedian with a screamingly funny r?le. Now he could build it up. He had been working on it half unconsciously all night and all day.
 
The second night he marched into the scene with the authority of one who is about to be very funny. In his first scenes he delivered his lines with enthusiasm, with appreciation of their humor. He took pains not to “walk into his laughs” as he had done the night before, when he had not expected any laughs. He waited for his laughs. He was amazed to note that they did not come. His pause left a hole in the action. He worked harder, underlined his important words, cocked his head as one who says, “The story I am about to tell you is the funniest thing you ever heard. You’ll die when you hear it.”
 
It was the scene that died. A new form of stage-fright sickened him. Hope perished. He was not a comedian, after all. His one success had been an accident.
 
When the first curtain fell he slunk away by himself to avoid Batterson’s searching eyes. To complete his shame he saw that Batterson was talking earnestly with the new-comer from New York.
 
Old Mrs. Vining sauntered his way. He tried to escape, but the heavy standard of a bunch-light cut him off. She approached him and began in that acid tone of hers:
 
“Young man, there are two things that are important to a comedian. One is to get a laugh, and the other is to nail it. You got your laughs last night and you’ve lost ’em to-night. Do you know why?”
 
“If I only did! I’m playing twice as hard to-night.”
 
“You bet you are, and you’re hard as zinc. You keep telling the audience how funny you’re going to be, and that finishes you. Now you’ve lived long enough to know that there are few jokes in the world so funny that they can stand being boosted before they’re told. Play your part straight, man. You can fake pathos and rub it in, but of all things always play comedy straight.
 
“And another thing, don’t fidget! One of the best comedians that ever walked the stage told me once, ‘I know only one secret for getting laughs, and that is, Nobody must move when the laugh comes.’ But to-night you never waited for anybody else to kill your laughs. You butchered ’em yourself by lolling your head and making fool gestures. Quit it! Now you go on in the next act and play the part as you did last night. Be gloomy and quiet and depressed. That’s what makes ’em laugh out there—the sight of your misery. There’s nothing funny to them in your being so damned cheerful as you were to-night.”
 
Eldon said, “Thank you very much, Mrs. Vining.” But he was not convinced of anything except his fatal and eternal unfitness to be an actor. He walked into the second act carrying his old burden of dejection; he rather moaned than delivered his lines. And the people laughed.
 
The cruelty of the public heart angered Eldon and he made further experiment in dolor. Laughs came now that he had not secured the night before. The others were bigger than then. He threw into some of his lines such subcellar misery that he broke up Sheila. When he made the laughing exit he did not even chuckle, he moaned. And the result was a tornado. People mopped their eyes.
 
Batterson met him with a quizzical smile: “You got ’em going to-night nearly as good as the time your lantern went out.”
 
That was higher praise than it sounded at first hearing.
 
When Mrs. Vining made her exit she said, “Aha! What did I tell you, young man?”
 
When Sheila came off she sought him out, and cried, “Oh, you were wonderful, simply wonderful!”
 
And when Batterson growled at her: “You spoiled several of his best laughs by talking through ’em. You ought to know better than that,” Sheila was so pleased for Eldon’s sake that she relished the rebuke.
 
Mrs. Vining had warned him to nail his laughs. At the next performance he tried to repeat his exact effects. Some of them he forgot, some of them he remembered. But they did not work this time. Others went better than ever. Each point was a new battle.
 
And so it was with every repetition. No two audiences were alike. Each had its own individuality. He began to study audiences as individuals. The first part of his first act was his period of getting acquainted. Some houses were quick and some slow, some noisily demonstrative, some quietly satisfied. It took all his powers to play his part. And he could not tire of it because every night was a first night in a new r?le.
 
Success made another man of him. He was interested in his task. He was winning praise for it. The management voluntarily raised his salary a little. He held his head a trifle higher.
 
Sheila noted the change at once. She liked him the better for it. She repeated her invitation to tea. He accepted now, and appeared in some new clothes. They were vastly becoming. On the stage he played a middle-aged henpecked plebeian. Off the stage he was young and handsome and thoroughbred.
 
He was a reader, too, and Sheila, like most actresses, was an omnivorous browser. They talked books. She lent him one of hers. He cherished it as if it were a breviary. They argued over literature and life. He ventured to contradict her. He was no longer a big mastiff at heel. He was forceful and stubborn. These qualities do not greatly displease a woman who likes a man.
 
Mrs. Vining was amused at first by the change in Sheila. Latterly the girl was constantly quoting “Mr. Eldon.” By and by it was “As Floyd Eldon says,” and one day Mrs. Vining heard, “Last night Floyd was telling me.” Then Aunt John grew alarmed, for she did not want Sheila to be in love—not for a long while yet, and never with an actor.
 
And Sheila had no intention of falling in love with an actor. But this did not prevent her from being the best of friends with one. All of Eldon’s qualities charmed Sheila as she discovered them. She had leisure for the discovery. There were no rehearsals; business was good at the theater; Eldon grew better and better in his performance. Sheila kept up her pace and enlarged her following. They dwelt in an atmosphere of contentment. But as her personal public increased and as the demands on her spirits and her time increased she began to take more pleasure in the company of Eldon and to like him best alone. She began to break old engagements, or fulfil them briefly, and to refuse new invitations.
 
Mrs. Vining was not able to be about for a while. Her neuralgia was revived by the knife-winds of Chicago. But Sheila and Eldon found them highly stimulating. He joined her in her constitutionals.
 
Chicago was large enough to give them a kind of seclusion by multitude, the solitude of a great forest. Among Chicago’s myriads the little “Friend in Need” company was lost to view. It was possible to go about with Eldon and never meet a fellow-trooper; to walk miles with him along the Lake front, or through Lincoln Park, to sidle past the pictures in the Art Institute or the Field Museum, and rest upon the benches in galleries where the dumb beauty on the walls warmed the soul to sensitiveness.
 
And when they were not alone their hearts seemed to commune without exchange of word or glance. He told her first how wonderful an artist she was, and by and by he was crediting her art to her wonderful “personality.” She told him that he had “personality,” too, lots of it, and charming. She told him that the stage needed men of birth and breeding and higher education, especially when these were combined with such—such—she could hardly say beauty—so she fell back again on that useful term—“personality.”
 
They never tired of discussing the technic of their trade and its emotional grandeurs. He told her that his main ambition was to see her achieve the heights God meant her for; he only wished that he might trudge on after her, in her wake. She told him that he had far greater gifts than she had, and that his future was boundless.
 
Finally she convinced him that she was convinced of this, and over a tea-table in the Auditorium Hotel he murmured—and trembled with the terrific audacity of it as he murmured:
 
“If only we could always play together—twin stars.”
 
She was shocked as if she had touched a live wire of frightful beatitude. And her lips shivered as she mumbled, “Would you like that?”
 
He could only sigh enormously. And his eyes were full of devout longing as he whispered, “Let’s!”
 
They burst into laughter like children planning some tremendous game. And then Mrs. Vining had to walk into their cloud-Eden and dissolve it into a plain table at which she seated herself.
 
Mrs. Vining was thinking “Aha!” as she crossed the room to their table. “It’s high time I was getting well. Affairs have been progressing since I began to nurse my neuralgia.”
 
She resolved to stick around, like the “demon chaperon” of Fontaine Fox’s comic pictures. At all costs she must rescue Sheila from the wiles of this good-looking young man. For her ward to lose her head and find her heart in an affair with an actor would be a disaster indeed; the very disaster that Sheila’s mother had warned her against.
 
Of course Sheila’s mother had married an actor and been as happy as a woman had a right to expect to be with any man. And of course Mrs. Vining’s own dear dead John Vining had been the most lovable of rascals. But such bits of luck could not keep on recurring in the same family.
 
And Mr. Reben did not believe in marriage for actors, either. He had many reasons far from romantic. The public did not like its innocent heroines to be wives. The prima donna’s husband is a proverb of trouble-making. Separated, the couple pine; united, they quarrel with other members of the company or with each other. Children arrive contrary to bookings and play havoc with youth and vivacity, changing the frivolous Juliet into a Nurse or a Roman Matron.
 
Reben would have been infuriated to learn that Sheila Kemble, his Sheila of the golden future, was dallying on the brink of an infatuation for an infatuated minor member of one of his companies. A flirtation, even, was too dangerous to permit. He would have dismissed Eldon without a moment’s pity if he had known what none of the company had yet suspected. Unwittingly he accomplished the effect he would have sought if he had been aware.
 
Reben ran out to Chicago ostensibly, according to his custom, to inspect the troupe in the last fortnight of its run there. He invited Sheila to supper with Mrs. Vining. He criticized Sheila severely and praised Miss Griffen. Later, as if quite casually, he spoke to Mrs. Vining of a new play he had found abroad. It was a man star’s play. “I bought it for Tom Brereton,” he said, “but the leadin’ woman’s r?le is rather interestin’.”
 
He described one of her scenes and noted that Sheila was instantly excited. It was one of those craftsmanly achievements the English dramatists arrive at oftener than ours, and it had made the instant fame of the actress who played it in London. Having dropped this golden apple before Atalanta, he changed the subject carelessly.
 
Sheila turned back to the apple:
 
“Tell me more about the play, please!”
 
Reben told her more, permitted her to coax him to tell it all. He yawned so crudely that she would have noticed his wiles if she had been able to think of anything but that r?le; for an actress thrills at the thought of putting on one of these costumes of the soul as quickly as an average woman grows incandescent before a new gown.
 
Sheila clasped her hands and shook her head like a beggar outside a restaurant window: “Oh, but I envy the woman who plays that part! Who is she?”
 
“Parton, I suppose,” Reben yawned. “But she’s fallen off lately. Gone and got herself in love—and with a fool actor, of all people! The idiot! I’ve a notion to chuck her. After all the money and publicity I’ve wasted on her, to fall for a dub like that!”
 
She............