“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.