Reben followed up his telegram by a letter of protest against Sheila’s bad faith. He referred to the expense he had been at; he had bought a great foreign play, paying down heavy advance royalties; he had given large orders to scene-painters, lithographers, and printers, and had flooded the country with her photographs and his announcements. The cast was selected, and her defection would mean cruelty to them as well as disloyalty to him.
She felt helpless. Winfield was helpless. She could only mourn and he rage. They were like two lovers who find themselves on separate ships.
Winfield went back to his father’s factory in a fume of wrath and grief. Sheila went to Reben’s factory with the meekness of a mill-hand carrying a dinner-pail.
Sheila made a poor effort to smile at the stage-door keeper, who lifted his hat to her and welcomed her as if she were the goddess of spring. The theater had been lonely all summer, but with the autumn was burgeoning into vernal activity.
The company in its warm-weather clothes made little spots of color in the dimly lighted cave of the stage. The first of the members to greet Sheila was Floyd Eldon.
Eldon seized both of Sheila’s hands and wrung them, and his heart cried aloud in his soft words: “God bless you, Sheila. We’re to be together again and I’m to play your lover again. You’ve got to listen to me telling you eight times a week how much I—”
“Why, Mr. Batterson, how do you do?”
The director—Batterson again—came forward with other troupers, old friends or strangers. Then Reben called to Sheila from the night beyond the footlights. She stumbled and groped her way out front to him, and he scolded her roundly for giving him such a scare.
The director’s voice calling the company together rescued her from answering Reben’s questions as to the mysterious “change of plans” that had inspired her telegram.