Even when she escaped to study the new lines she could not get her mind on anything but fears for the train that carried her husband.
After dinner Reben called on her for a chat. He alluded to the fact that he had wired ahead for the best room in the best hotel for the new star.
Sheila was aghast at this complication, which she would have foreseen if she had ever been either a star or a bride before.
Reben was in a mood of hope. The voyage to new scenes heartened everybody except Sheila. Reben kept trying to cheer her up. He could best have cheered her by leaving her. He imputed her distracted manner to stage-fright. It was everything but that.
That night Sheila knew for the first time what loneliness really means. She pined in solitude, an early widow.
The train was late in arriving and the company was ordered to report at the theater in half an hour. The company-manager informed Sheila that her trunk would be sent to her hotel as soon as possible. She thanked him curtly, and he growled to Batterson:
“She’s playing the prima donna already.”
She was all befuddled by this new tangle. How was she to smuggle her trunk from the hotel to her husband’s lodgings, and where were they? He had arranged to leave a letter at the theater instructing her where they were to pitch their tent. She went directly to the theater.
She found a corpulent envelope in the mail-box at the stage door. It was full of mourning for the lost hours and full of enthusiasm over the cozy nook Bret had discovered in the outer edge of town. He implored her to make haste.
As she set out to find a telephone and explain to him the delay for rehearsal, she was called back by Reben to the dark stage where Batterson and Prior and Eldon were gathered under the glimmer of a few lights on an iron standard. They were discussing a new bit of business.