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 now.

on the morning of the performance miss mayme greeley woke up with an attack of hay-fever in full bloom. the june flowers had filled her with a kind of powder that went

off like intermittent skyrockets. she began to pack her trunk for immediate flight to a pollenless clime. it looked as if she were trying to sneeze her head into her

trunk. there was no possibility of her playing the fairy queen when her every other word was ker-choo!

sheila saw it coming. before the committee approached her like a press-gang she knew that she was drafted. she knew the r?le from having rehearsed it. mayme’s costume

would fit her, and if she did not jump into the gap the whole affair would have to be put off.

these were not the least of the sarcasms fate was lavishing on her that her wicked past as an actress, which had kept her under suspicion so long, should be the means

of bringing the village to her feet; that the church should drive her back on the stage; that the stage should be a plot of grass, that her own children should play

the leading parts, and she be cast for a “bit” in their support.

thus it was that sheila returned to the drama, shanghaied as a reluctant understudy. the news of the positive appearance of the great mrs. winfield—“sheila kemble as

was, the famous star, you know”—drew the whole town to the winfield lawn.

the stage was a level of sward in front of the two birches, with rhododendron-bushes for wings. the audience filled the terraces, the porches, and even the surrounding

trees.

the masque was an unimportant improvisation that vickery had jingled off in hours of rest from the labor of his big play, “clipped wings.”

but it gained a mysterious charm from the setting. people were so used to seeing plays in artificial light among flat, hand-painted trees with leaves pasted on visible

fishnets, that actual sunlight, genuine grass, and trees in three dimensions seemed poetically unreal and unknown.

the plot of the masque was not revolutionary.

dorothy played a mother who quieted her four clamoring children with fairy-stories at bedtime; then they dreamed that a fairy queen visited them and transported them

magically in their beds to fairyland.

at the height of the revel a rooster cock-a-doodle-did, the fairies scampered home, the children woke up to find themselves out in the woods in their nighties, and

they skedaddled. curtain.

the magic transformation scene did not work, of course. the ropes caught in the trees and bret’s chauffeur and gottlieb hauf had to get a stepladder and fuss about,

while the sleeping children sat up and the premature fairies peeked and snickered. then the play went on.

bret watched the performance with the indulgent contempt one feels for his unprofessional friends when they try to act. it puzzled him to see how bad dorothy was.

all she had to do was to gather her family about her and talk them to sleep. sheila had reminded her of this and pleaded:

“just play yourself, my dear.”

but dorothy had been as awkward and incorrigible as an overgrown girl.

to the layman it would seem the simplest task on earth—to play oneself. the acting trade knows it to be the most complex, the last height the actor attains, if he

ever attains it at all.

bret watched dorothy in amazement. he was too polite to say what he thought, since jim greeley was at his elbow. jim was not so polite. he spoke for bret when he

groaned:

“gee whiz! what’s the matter with that wife of mine? she’s put her kids to bed a thousand times and yet you’d swear she never saw a child in her life before. you’

d swear nobody else ever did. o lord! whew! i’ll get a divorce in the morning.”

the neighbors hushed him and protested with compliments as badly read and unconvincing as dorothy’s own lines. at last sheila came on, in the fairy-queen robes.

everybody knew that she was mrs. winfield, and that there were no fairies, at least in blithevale, nowadays.

yet somehow for the nonce one fairy at least was altogether undeniable and natural and real. the human mother putting her chicks to bed was the unheard-of, the

unbelievable fantasm. sheila was convincing beyond skepticism.

at the first slow circle of her wand, and the first sound of her easy, colloquial, yet poetic speech, there was a hush and, in one heart-throb, a sudden belief that

such things must be true, because they were too beautiful not to be; they were infinitely lovely beyond the cruelty of denial or the folly of resistance.

bret’s heart began to race with pride, then to thud heavily. first was the response to her beauty, her charm, her triumph with the neighbors who had whispered him

down because he had married an actress. then came the strangling clutch of remorse: what right had he to cabin and confine that bright spirit in the little cell of his

life? would she not vanish from his home as she vanished from the scene? actually, she merely walked between the rhododendron-bushes, but it had the effect of a mystic

escape.

there was great laughter when the children woke up and scooted across the lawn in their bed-gear, but the sensation was sheila’s. her ovation was overwhelming. the

women of the audience fairly attacked bret with congratulations. they groaned, shouted, and squealed at him:

“oh, your wife was wonderful! wonderful! wonderful! you must be so proud of her!”

he accepted her tributes with a guilty feeling of embezzlement, a feeling that the prouder he was of her the more ashamed he should be of himself.

he studied her from a distance as she took her homage in shy simplicity. she was happy with a certain happiness he had not seen on her face since he last saw her

taking her last curtain calls in a theater.

sheila was so happy that she was afraid that her joy would bubble out of her in disgraceful childishness. with her first entrance on the grassy “boards” she had felt

again the sense of an audience in sympathy and in subjection, the strange clasp of hands across the footlights, even though there were no footlights. it was a double

triumph because the audience was philistine and little accustomed to the theater. but she could feel the pulse of all those neighbors as if they had but one wrist and

she held that under her fingers, counting the leap and check of their one heart and making it beat as she willed.

the ecstasy of her power was closely akin, in so different a way, to what samson felt when the philistines that had rendered him helpless called him from the prison

where he did grind, to make them sport:

“he said unto the lad that held him by the hand, suffer me that i may feel the pillars whereupon the house standeth that i may lean upon them.” as he felt his

strength rejoicing again in his sinews, he prayed, “strengthen me only this once, o god, that i may be avenged of the philistines for my two eyes.”

nobody could be less like samson than sheila, yet in her capacity she knew what it was to have her early powers once more restored to her. and she bowed herself with

all her might—“and the house fell.”

an almost inconceivable joy rewarded sheila till the final spectator had italicized the last compliment. then, just as samson was caught under his own triumph, so

sheila went down suddenly under the ruination of her brief victory.

she was never to act again! she was never to act again!

when bret came slowly to her, the last of her audience, she read in his eyes just what he felt, and he read in her eyes just what she felt. they wrung hands in mutual

adoration and mutual torment. but all they said was:

“you were never so beautiful! you never acted so well!” and “if you liked me, that’s all i want.”

the next morning bret woke to a new and busy day after a night of perfect oblivion. sheila did not get up, as her new habit was, but she reverted to type. she said

that she had not slept and bret urged her to stay where she was till she was rested.

later, as he was knotting his tie, he glanced from the window as usual at the birches whose wedding he was so proud of. his hands paused at his throat and his fingers

stiffened. he called, “sheila! sheila! come look!”

he forgot that she had not risen with him. she lifted herself heavily from her pillow and came slowly to his side. she brushed back her heavy hair from her heavy eyes

and said, “what is it?”

“look at the difference in the birches. ‘bret’ is bright and fine and every leaf is shining. but look at ‘sheila’!”

the sheila tree seemed to have died in the night. the leaves drooped, shriveled, turning their dull sides outward on the black branches. the wind, that made the other

tree glisten like breeze-shaken water, sent only a mournful shudder through her listless foliage.