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.”