Sheila saw the anguish of dread cover his face like a sudden fling of ashes. He handed the telegram to her, and she put her arms about his shoulders to uphold him and   
shelter him from the sledge of fate.
 
“Poor old dad!” he groaned. “And mother! I must take the first train.”
 
She nodded her head dismally.
 
He read the telegram again in a stupor, and mumbled, “I wish you could come with me.”
 
“If I only could!”
 
“You ought to,” he urged.
 
“Oh, I know it—but I can’t.”
 
“You may never see my father again.”
 
“Don’t say that! He’ll get well, honey; you mustn’t think anything else. Oh, it’s too bad! it’s just too bad!”
 
He felt lonely and afraid of what was ahead of him. He was afraid of his father’s death, and of a funeral. He was terrified at the thought of his mother’s woe. He 
 
could feel her clutching at him helplessly, frantically, and telling him that he was all she had left. His eyes filled with tears at the vision and they blinded him to 
 
everything but the vision. He put his hands out through the mist and caught Sheila’s arms and pleaded:
 
“You ought to come with me, now of all times.”
 
She could only repeat and repeat: “I know it, but I can’t, I can’t. You see that I can’t, don’t you, honey?”
 
His voice was harsh when he answered: “No, I don’t see why you can’t. Your place is there.”
 
She cast her eyes up and beat her palms together hopelessly over the complete misunderstanding that thwarted the union of their souls. She took his hands again and 
 
squeezed them passionately.
 
Reben came upon them, swinging his cane. Seeing the two holding hands, he essayed a frivolity. “Honeymoon not on the wane yet?”
 
Sheila told him the truth. He was all sympathy at once. His race made him especially tender to filial love, and his grief brought tears to his eyes. He crushed Bret’s 
 
hands in his own and poured out sorrow like an ointment. His deep voice trembled with fellowship:
 
“If I could only do anything to help you!”
 
Winfield caught at the proffer. “You can! Let Sheila go home with me.”
 
Reben gasped. “My boy, my boy! It’s impossible! The matinée begins in half an hour. She should be making up now.”
 
“Let somebody else play her part.”
 
“There is no understudy ready. We never select the understudy for the try-out performances. Sheila, you must understand.”
 
“I do, of course; but poor Bret—he can’t seem to.”
 
“Oh, all right, I understand,” Winfield sighed with a resignation that terrified Sheila. “What train can I get? Do you know?”
 
Reben knew the trains. He would get the company-manager to secure the tickets. Bret must go by way of Detroit. He could not leave till after five. He would reach 
 
Buffalo early Sunday morning and be home in the late afternoon.
 
The big fellow’s frame shook with anxiety. So much could happen in twenty-four hours. It would seem a year to his poor mother. He hurried away to send her a telegram. 
 
Sheila paused at the stage door, staring after his forlorn figure; then she darted in to her task.
 
Bret came back shortly and dropped into a chair in Sheila’s dressing-room. His eyes, dulled with grief, watched her as she plastered on her face the various layers of 
 
color, spreading the carmine on cheek and ear with savage brilliance, penciling her eyelashes till thick beads of black hung from them, painting her eyelids blue above 
 
and below, and smearing her lips with scarlet.
 
He turned from her, sick with disgust.
 
Sheila felt his aversion, and it choked her when she tried to comfort him. She painted her arms and shoulders white and powdered them till clouds of dust rose from the 
 
puff. Pennock made the last hooks fast and Sheila rose for the final primpings of coquetry.
 
Pennock opened the door of the dressing-room to listen for the cue. When the time came Sheila sighed, ran to Bret, clasped him in a tight embrace, and kissed his wet 
 
forehead. Her arms left white streaks across his coat, and her lips red marks on his face.
 
He followed to watch her make her entrance. She stood a moment between the flats, turned and stared her adoration at him through her viciously leaded eyelashes, and 
 
wafted him a sad kiss. Then she caught up her train and began to laugh softly as from a distance. She ran out into the glow of artificial noon, laughing. A faint 
 
applause greeted her, the muffled applause of a matinée audience’s gloved hands.
 
Bret watched her, heard her voice sparkle, heard it greeted with waves of hilarity. He could not realize how broken-hearted she was for him. He could not understand 
 
how separate a thing her stage emotions were from her personal feelings.
 
Good news would not have helped her comedy; bad news could hardly alter it. She went through her well-learned lines and intonations as a first-class soldier does the 
 
manual of arms without reference to his love or grief.
 
All Bret knew was that his wife was out there, laughing and causing laughter, while far away his mother was sobbing—sobbing perhaps above the chill clay of his 
 
father.
 
He hurried from the stage door to pack his trunk. He went cursing the theater, and himself for lingering in its infamous shadow. He did not come back till the play was 
 
over and Sheila in her street clothes. In her haste she had overlooked traces of her make-up—that odious blue about the eyes, the pink edging of the ears, the lead on 
 
the eyelashes.
 
Once more Sheila went to the train with her husband. They clung together in fierce farewells, repeated and repeated till the train was moving and the porter must run 
 
alongside to help Bret aboard.
 
When he looked back he could not see Sheila’s pathetic figure and her sad face. When he thought of her he thought of her laughing in her motley. All the next day he 
 
thought of her in the theater rehearsing.
 
He loved her perhaps the more for that unattainable soul of hers. He had won her, wed her, possessed her, made her his in body and name; but her soul was still 
 
uncaptured. He vowed and vowed again that he would make her altogether his. She was his wife; she should be like other wives.
 
When he reached home his father was dead. His mother was too weak with grief to rebuke him for being on a butterfly-hunt at such a time.
 
He knelt by her bed and held her in his arms while she told him of his father’s long fight to keep alive till his boy came back. She begged him not to leave her 
 
again, and he promised her that he would make her home his.
 
The days that ensued were filled with tasks of every solemn kind. There was the funeral to prepare for and endure, and after that the assumption of all his father’s 
 
wealth. This came to him, not as a mighty treasure to squander, but as a delicate invalid to nurture and protect.
 
Sheila’s telegrams and letters were incessant and so full of devotion for him that they had room for little about herself.
 
She told him she was working hard and missing him terribly, and what her next address would be. She tried vainly to mask her increasing terror of the dreadful opening 
 
in Chicago.
 
He wished that he might be with her, yet knew that he had no real help to give her. He prayed for her success, but with a mental reservation that if the play were the 
 
direst failure he would not be sorry, for it would bring them to peace the sooner.
 
He tried to school his undisciplined mind to the Herculean task of learning in a few days what his father had acquired by a life of toil. The factory ran on smoothly 
 
under the control of its superintendents, but big problems concerning the marketing of the output, consolidation with the trust, and enlargement of the plant, were 
 
rising every hour. These matters he must decide like an infant king whose ministers disagree.
 
To his shame and dismay, he could not give his whole heart to the work; his heart was with Sheila. He thought of her without rancor now. He recognized the bravery and 
 
honor that had kept her with the company. As she had told him once before, treachery to Reben would be a poor beginning of her loyalty to Bret. The very things he 
 
cherished bitterly against her turned sweet in his thoughts. He decided that he could not live without her, and might as well recognize it.
 
He found himself clenching his hands at his desk and whispering prayers that the play should be a complete failure. How else could they be reunited? He could not shirk 
 
his own responsibilities. It was not a man’s place to give up his career. There was only one hope—the failure of the play.
 
But “The Woman Pays” was a success. The Grand Rapids oracle guessed wrong. As sometimes happens, the city critics were kinder than the rural. Sheila sent Bret a 
 
double night-telegram. She said that she was sorry to say that the play had “gone over big.” She had an enormous ovation; there had been thirty curtain calls; the 
 
audience had made her make a speech. Reben had said the play would earn a mint of money. And then she added that she missed Bret “terribly,” and loved him “madly 
 
and nothing else mattered.”
 
The next day she telegraphed him that the critics were “wonderful.” She quoted some of their eulogies and announced that she was mailing the clippings to him. But 
 
she said that she would rather hear him speak one word of praise than have them print a million. He did not believe it, but he liked to read it.
 
He did not wait to receive the clippings. He gave up opposing his ravenous heart, and took train for Chicago. He could not bear to have everybody except himself 
 
acclaiming his wife in superlatives.
 
He decided to surprise her. He did not even telegraph a warning. Indeed, when he reached Chicago in the early evening, he resolved to see the performance before he let 
 
her know he was in town.
 
He could not get by Mr. McNish, who was “on the door,” without being recognized, but he asked McNish not to let “Miss Kemble” know that he was in the house. McNish 
 
agreed readily; he did not care to agitate Sheila during the performance. After the last curtain fell her emotions would be her own.
 
McNish was glowing as he watched the crowd file past the ticket-taker. He chuckled: “It’s a sell-out to-night I bet. This afternoon we had the biggest first matinée 
 
this theater has known for years. I told Reben two years ago that the little lady was star material. He said he’d never thought of it. She’s got personality and she 
 
gets it across. She plays herself, and that’s the hardest kind of acting there is. I discover her, and Reben cops the credit and the coin. Ain’t that life all over?
 
”
 
Bret agreed that it was, and hurried to his seat. It was in the exact center of a long row. He was completely surrounded by garrulous women trying to outchatter even 
 
the strenuous coda of the band.
 
A fat woman on his right bulged over into his domain and filled the arm of his chair with her thick elbow. A lean woman on his left had an arm some inches too long for 
 
her space, and her elbow projected like a spur into Bret’s ribs. He could have endured their contiguity if they had omitted their conversation. The overweening woman 
 
was chewing gum and language with the same grinding motions, giving her words a kind of stringy quality.
 
“Jevver see this Sheilar Kemble?” she munched. “I seen her here some time ago. She didn’t have a very big part, but she played it perfect. She was simpully 
 
gurrand. I says at the time to the gempmum was with me, I says, ‘Somebody ought to star that girl.’ I guess I must ’a’ been overheard, for here she is.
 
“A lady frien’ o’ mine went last night, and told me I mustn’t miss it. She says they got the handsomest actor playin’ the lover—feller name of Weldon or Weldrum 
 
or something like that—but anyway she says he makes love something elegant, and so does Sheilar. This frien’ o’ mine says they must be in love with each other, for 
 
nobody could look at one another that way without they meant it. Well, we’ll soon see.”
 
To hear his wife’s name and Eldon’s chewed up together in the gum of a strange plebeian was disgusting.
 
The sharp-elbowed woman was talking all the while in a voice of affected accents:
 
“She’s almost a lady, this Kemble gull. Really, she was received in the veribest homes hyah lahst wintuh. Yes, I met hah everywhah. She was really quite refined—for 
 
an actress, of cawse. Several of the nicest young men made quite fools of themselves—quite. Fawtunately their people saved them from doing anything rahsh. I suppose 
 
she’ll upset them all again this season. There ought to be some fawm of inoculation to protect young men against actresses. Don’t you think so? It’s fah more 
 
dangerous than typhoid fevah, don’t you think so?”
 
All about him Bret he............