winfield had said, “i ought to!” it is strange that we always say “i ought to” with skepticism, wondering both “shall i?” and “will i?” if our selves are our

real gods, we are all agnostics.

the next morning sheila woke with less than her yester joy. leisure was not so much a luxury and more of a bore. not that she felt regret for the lack of rehearsals.

she was not interested in plays, but in the raw material of plays, and she was not so proud of her noble renunciation of bret winfield as she had been.

to fight off her new loneliness she decided to go shopping. when men are restless they go to clubs or billiard-parlors or saloons. women go prowling through the shops.

the clinton shops were as unpromising to sheila as a man’s club in summer. but there was no other way to kill time.

as she set out she saw bret winfield’s car loafing in front of her hotel. he was sitting in it. the faces of both showed a somewhat dim surprise. sheila quickened her

steps to the curb, where he hastened to alight.

“you didn’t go,” she said, brilliantly.

“no.”

“why not?”

“i—i couldn’t.”

“why?”

“well, i didn’t sleep a wink last night, and—”

“i didn’t close my eyes, either.”

it was a perfectly sincere statement on both sides and perfectly untrue in both cases. both had slept enviably most of the time they thought they were awake. sheila

tried to make conversation:

“what was on your mind?”

“you!”

his words filled her with delicious fright. on the lofty hill under the low-hanging moon he had scared love off by attempted caresses. with one word he brought love

back in a rose-clouded mantle that gave their communion a solitude there on the noisy street with the cars brawling by and the crowds passing and peering, people

nudging and whispering: “that’s her! that’s sheila kemble! ain’t she pretty? she’s just grand in the new show! saw it yet?”

they stood in gawky speechlessness till he said, “which way you going?”

“i have some shopping to do.”

“oh! too bad. i was going to ask you to take a little spin.”

they span.

winfield did not leave clinton till the week was gone and sheila with it. they were together constantly, making little efforts at concealment that attracted all manner

of attention in the whole jealous town.

vickery and eldon were not the least alive to winfield’s incursion into sheila’s thoughts. both regarded it as nothing less than a barbaric danger. both felt that

winfield, for all his good qualities, was a philistine. they knew that he had little interest in the stage as an institution, and no reverence for it. it was to him an

amusement at best, and a scandal at worst.

but to vickery the theater was the loftiest form of literary publication, and to eldon it was the noblest forum of human debate. to both of them sheila was as a high

priestess at an altar. they felt that winfield wanted to lure her or drag her away from the temple to an old-fashioned home where her individuality would be merged in

her husband’s manufacturing interests, and her histrionism would be confined to an audience of one, or to the entertainment of her own children.

this feeling was entirely apart from the love that both of them felt for sheila the woman. each was sure in his heart that his own love for sheila was far the greatest

of the three loves.

vickery forgot even his own vain struggles to make the heroine of his play behave, in his eagerness to save sheila from ruining the dramatic unity of her life by

interpolating a commercial marriage as the third act. he found a chance to speak to her one afternoon just before the second curtain rose. he was as excited as if he

had been making a curtain speech and nearly as awkward:

“sheila,” he hemmed and hawed, “i want to speak to you very frankly about bret. of course, he’s a splendid fellow and a friend i’m very fond of, but if he goes

and makes you fall in love with him i’ll break his head.”

“he’s bigger than you are,” sheila laughed.

“yes,” vickery admitted, “but there are clubs that are harder than even his hard head. if he takes you off the stage i’ll never forgive myself for introducing him

to you. i’ll never forgive him, either—or you. in heaven’s name, sheila, don’t let him take you off the stage. i’ve heard of hitching your wagon to a star, but

this would be hitching a star to a wagon. i can’t ask you to marry me for the lord knows how long; even assuming that you would consider me if i had a million instead

of being a penniless playwright; but i at least would try to help you on in your career. i’d rather you wouldn’t marry either of us than marry him.”

sheila chuckled luxuriously: “don’t you lose any sleep over me, vick. in the first place, mr. winfield has never even suggested that i should marry him.”

which was fact.

“in the second place, if he did i should decline him with thanks.”

which was prophecy.

vickery was so relieved that he returned to the discussion of his play. he promised to have it ready for fall rehearsals. sheila assured him that she would be ready

whenever the play was. then her cue came and she walked into her laboratory, while vickery hastened out front to study the effect of his new lines on the audience.

when sheila issued from her dressing-room for the third act, in which she did not appear for some time after the curtain was up, she found eldon waiting for her. he

was suffering as from stage-fright, and he delivered the lines he had been rehearsing in his dressing-room nearly as badly as the lines he had forgotten the night he

played the farmer with the dark lantern. the substance of what he jumbled was this:

“sheila, i want to speak very frankly to you. don’t take it for mere jealousy, though you have hardly looked at me since mr. vickery and the winfield fellow struck

town. i don’t suppose you care for me any more, but i beg you not to let anybody take you off the stage. you belong. you have the god-given gifts. your success proves

where your duty to yourself lies.

“if you can’t marry me and you must marry some one, marry our author. it would break my heart, but i’d rather he’d have you than anybody but me, for he’d keep you

where you belong, anyway. i suppose this winfield has some extraordinary charms for you. he seems a nice enough fellow and he’ll come into a heap of money. but if i

thought there was any danger of his carrying you off, i’d knock him so far out of the theater that he’d never—”

sheila was bristling up to say that two could play at the same game, but eldon had heard his signal for entrance, and, leaving his gloomy earnestness in the wings, he

breezed on to the stage with all imaginable flippancy. he came off just as gaily a little later, only to resume his sobriety and his speech the moment he passed the

side-line:

“as i was saying, sheila, i implore you not to ruin your life by marrying that man.”

sheila had many things to say, but her actress self had heard the approach of her cue, and she spoke hastily: “you are worrying yourself needlessly, floyd. in the

first place, mr. winfield has never even suggested that i should marry him; in the second place, if he did, i’d decline with—”

and then she slipped into the scene and became the creature of vickery’s fancy.

on saturday night the house-manager gave a farewell supper to sheila on the stage and naturally failed to include winfield in the invitations. he sulked about the

somnolent town in a dreadful fit of loneliness, but he could not get a word with sheila. sheila, now that she was leaving the company, felt a mingling of fondness for

the shabby old stage and the workaday troupe and of happiness at being pardoned out of the penitentiary.

on the morrow winfield asked her by telephone if he might take her to the train in his car. she consented. she was late getting ready, and he had to go at high speed,

with no chance for farewell conversation. as they reached the station his agony at leaving her wrenched from him a desperate plea:

“won’t you kiss me good-by?”

in the daylight, among the unromantic hacks, she laughed at the thought:

“kiss you good-by? why, i haven’t kissed you how-d’-do? yet!”