“I mean it, Sheila,” he declared. “This is your last night on the stage or your last night as my wife.”
She studied him narrowly. He really meant it! He went on:
“Joking or no joking, you were in another man’s arms and you had no idea when you were coming home. We have no home. I have no wife. It can’t go on. You come back with me to-morrow or I go back alone for good and all.”
“But Reben—” she interposed, helpless between the millstones of her two destinies as woman and artist.
“I’ll settle with Reben.”
She hardly pondered the decision. Suddenly it was made for her. She looked at her husband and felt that she belonged to him first, last, and forever. She was at the period when all her inheritances and all nature commanded her to be woman, to be wife to her man. It was good to have him decide for her.
She dropped to the floor again and breathed a little final, comfortable, “All right.”
Bret bent over and caught her up into his arms with a strength that assured her protection against all other claimants of her, and he kissed her with a contented certainty that he had never known before. Then he set her on her feet and said with a noble authority:
“Hurry and get out of those things and into your own.”
She laughed at his magistral tone, and her last act of independence was to put him out of the actress’s room and call Pennock to her aid. Bret stood guard in the corridor. If he had had any qualms of conscience they would have been eased by the sound of Sheila’s cheerful voice as she made old Pennock bestir herself.