There was a certain birch-tree on the hill behind the old Winfield homestead.  
The house itself sat well back in its ample green lawn, left fenceless after the manner of American village lawns. In the rear of the house there were many acres of 
 
gardens and pasture where cattle stood about, looking in the distance like toy cows out of a Noah’s Ark.
 
Beyond the pasture was the steep hill they flattered with the name of “the mountain.” To the children it furnished an unfailing supply of Indians, replenished as 
 
fast as they were slaughtered.
 
Every now and then Sheila had to be captured and tied to a tree and danced around by little Polly and young Bret and their friends, bedecked with feathers from 
 
dismantled dusters, brandishing “tommyhawks” and shooting with “bonarrers.”
 
Just as the terrified pale-face squaw was about to be given over to the torture the Indians would disappear, take off their feathers, rub the war mud off their noses, 
 
and lay aside their barbarous weapons; then arming themselves with wooden guns, they would charge to Sheila’s rescue, fearlessly annihilating the wraiths of their 
 
late selves.
 
One day when Sheila was bound to the tree she saw Bret stealing up to watch the game. He waved gaily to her and she nodded to him. Then the whim came to her to cease 
 
burlesquing the familiar r?le and play it for all it was worth. She imagined herself really one of those countless women whom the Indians captured and subjected to 
 
torment. Perhaps some woman, the wife of a pioneer, had once met her hideous doom in this same forest. She fancied she saw her house in flames and Bret shot dead as he 
 
fought toward her. She writhed and tugged at the imaginary and unyielding thongs. She pleaded for mercy in babbling hysteria, and for a climax sent forth one sincere 
 
scream of awful terror. If Dorothy’s mother had heard it she would have remembered the shriek of the little Ophelia.
 
Sheila noted that the redskins were silent. She looked about her through eyes streaming with fictional tears. She saw that Bret was plunging toward her, ashen with 
 
alarm. The neighbors’ children were aghast and her own boy and girl petrified. Then Polly and young Bret flung themselves on her in a frenzy of weeping sympathy.
 
Sheila began to laugh and Bret looked foolish. He explained:
 
“I thought a snake was coiled round you. Don’t do that again, in Heaven’s name.” That night he dreamed of her cry.
 
It was a long while before Sheila could comfort her children and convince them that it was all “pretend.”
 
After that, when they were incorrigible, she could always cow them by threatening, “If you don’t I’ll scream.”
 
The children would have been glad to make little canoes from the bark of the birch, but Sheila would not let them peel off the delicate human-like skin. The tree meant 
 
much to her, for she and Bret had been wont to climb up to it before there were any amateur Indians. Bret had carved their names on it in two linked hearts.
 
On the lawn in front of the house there was another birch-tree. It amused Bret to name the tree on the hill “Sheila” and the tree on the lawn “Bret.” And the 
 
nearest approach he ever made to poetry was to pretend that they were longing for each other. He probably absorbed that idea from the dimly remembered lyric of the 
 
pine-tree and the palm.
 
Sheila suggested that the birch from the lawn should climb up and dwell with the lonely tree on the heights. Bret objected that he and Sheila would never see them 
 
then, for they made few such excursions nowadays.
 
It struck him as a better idea to bring “Sheila” down to “Bret.” He decided to surprise his wife with the view of them together. He chose a day when Sheila was to 
 
take the children to a Sunday-school picnic. On his way to the office he spoke to the old German gardener he had inherited from his father. When Bret told him of his 
 
inspiration the old man (Gottlieb Hauf, his name was) shook his head and crinkled his thin lips with the superiority of learning for ignorance. He drawled:
 
“You shouldn’t do so,” and, as if the matter were ended, bent to snip a shrub he was manicuring.
 
“But I want it,” Bret insisted.
 
“You shouldn’t vant it,” and snipped again.
 
Opposition always hardened Bret. He took the shears from the old man and stood him up. “You do as I tell you—for once.”
 
Gottlieb could be stubborn, too. “Und I tell you die Birke don’t vant it. She don’t like it down here.”
 
“The other birch-tree is flourishing down here.”
 
“Dot makes nuttink out. Die Birke up dere she like vere she is. She like plenty sun.”
 
“This one grows in the shade.”
 
“Diese Birke don’t know nuttink about sun. She alvays grows im Schatten.”
 
“Well, the other one would like the shade if it had a chance. You bring it down here.”
 
The old man shook his head stubbornly and reached for the shears.
 
Bret was determined to have his own way. “Is it my tree or yours?”
 
“She is your tree—but she don’t like. You move her, she dies.”
 
“Bosh! You do as you’re told.”
 
“All right. I move her.”
 
“To-day?”
 
“Next vinter.”
 
“Now!”
 
“Um Gotteswillen! She dies sure. Next vinter or early sprink, maybe she has a chence, but to move her in summer—no!”
 
“Yes!”
 
“Nein doch!”
 
Bret choked with rage. “You move that tree to-day or you move yourself out of here.”
 
Gottlieb hesitated for a long while, but he felt that he was too old to be transplanted. Besides, that tree up there was none of his own children. He consented with as 
 
bad grace as possible. He moved the tree, grumbling, and doing his best for the poor thing. He took as large a ball of earth with the roots as he could manage, but he 
 
had to sever unnumbered tiny shoots, and the voyage down the mountain filled him with misgivings.
 
When Bret came home that night the two trees stood close together like Adam and Eve whitely saluting the sunset. Over them a great tulip-tree towered a hundred feet in 
 
air, and all aglow with its flowers like a titanic bridal bouquet. When the bedraggled Sheila came back with the played-out children she was immeasurably pleased with 
 
the thoughtfulness of the surprise.
 
The next morning Bret called her to the window to see how her namesake laughed with all her leaves in the early light. The two trees seemed to laugh together. “It’s 
 
their honeymoon,” he said. When he left the house old Gottlieb was shaking his head over the spectacle. Bret triumphantly cuffed him on the shoulder. “You see! I 
 
told you it would be all right.”
 
“Vait once,” said Gottlieb.
 
A few days before this Dorothy had called on Sheila to say that the church was getting up an open-air festival, a farewell to the congregation about to disperse for 
 
the summer. They wanted to borrow the Winfield lawn.
 
Sheila consented freely. Also, they wanted to give a kind of masque. Masques were coming back into fashion and Vickery had consented to toss off a little fantasy, 
 
mainly about children and fairies, with one or two grown-ups to hold them together.
 
Sheila thought it an excellent idea.
 
Also, they wanted Sheila to play the principal part, the mother of the children.
 
Sheila declined with the greatest cordiality.
 
Dorothy pleaded. Sheila was adamant. She would work her head off and direct the rehearsals, she said, but she was a reformed actress who would not backslide even for 
 
the church.
 
Other members of the committee and even the old parson begged Sheila to recant, but she beamed and refused. Rehearsals began with Dorothy as the mother and Jim’s 
 
sister Mayme as the fairy queen. Sheila’s children and Dorothy’s and a mob of others made up the rest of the cast, human and elfin.
 
Sheila worked hard, but her material was unpromising—all except her own daughter, whom she had named after Bret’s mother and whom she called “Polly” after her own. 
 
Little Polly displayed a strange sincerity, a trace of the Kemble genius for pretending.
 
When Vickery, who came down to see his work produced and saw little Polly, it was like seeing again the little Sheila whom he still remembered.
 
He told big Sheila of it, and her eyes grew humid with tenderness.
 
He said, “I wrote my first play for you—and I’d be willing to write my last for you now if you’d act in it.”
 
Sheila blessed him for it as if it were a beautiful obituary for her dead self. He did not tell her that he was writing her into his masterpiece, that she was posing 
 
for him even no............