The betrothed couple had no opportunity to seal the engagement with the usual ceremonies. When they met again, fully clothed, she was so late to her luncheon that she   
had to fly.
 
Already, after their high tragedy and their rosy romance, the little things of existence were asserting their importance. That afternoon Sheila had an engagement that 
 
she could not get out of, and a dinner afterward. She had booked these dates without dreaming of what was to happen.
 
It was not till late in the evening that Sheila could steal away to Winfield, who stole across the lawn to her piazza by appointment.
 
The scene was perfectly set. An appropriate moon was in her place. The breeze was exquisitely aromatic. Winfield was in summer costume of dinner-suit and straw hat. 
 
Sheila was in a light evening gown with no hat.
 
They cast hasty glances about, against witnesses, and then he flung his arms around her, and she flung hers around him. He crushed her as fiercely as he dared, and she 
 
him as fiercely as she could. Their lips met in the great kiss of betrothal.
 
She was happy beyond endurance. She was in love and her beloved loved her.
 
All the Sheilas there were in her soul agreed for once that she was happy to the final degree, contented beyond belief, imparadised on earth. The Sheilas voted 
 
unanimously that love was life; love was the greatest thing in the world; that woman’s place was with her lover, that a woman’s forum was the home; and that any 
 
career outside the walls was a plaything to be put away and forgotten like a hobby-horse outgrown.
 
As for her stage career—pouf! into the attic with it where her little tin house and the tiny tin kitchen and her knitted bear and the glueless dolls reposed. She was 
 
going to have a real house and real children and real life.
 
While she was consigning her ambitions to the old trunk up-stairs, Winfield was refurbishing his ambitions. He was going to do work enough for two, be ambitious for 
 
both and make Sheila the proudest wife of the busiest husband in the husband business.
 
But these great resolutions were mainly roaring in the back parlors of their brains. On the piazzas of their lips were words of lovers’ nonsense. There is no use 
 
quoting them. They would sound silly even to those who have used them themselves.
 
They sounded worse than that to Roger and Polly, who heard them all.
 
Roger and Polly had come home from dancing half an hour before, and had dropped into chairs in the living-room. The moon on the sea was dazzling. They watched it 
 
through the screens that strained the larger mosquitoes, then they put out the lights because the view was better and because enough mosquitoes were already in the 
 
house.
 
The conversation of the surf had made all the necessary language and Roger and Polly sat in the tacit comfort of long-married couples. They had heard Sheila brought 
 
home by a young man whom she dismissed with brevity. Before they found energy to call to her, another young man had hurried across the grass. To their intense 
 
amazement he leaped at Sheila and she did not scream. Both merged into one silhouette.
 
Polly and Roger were aghast, but they dared not speak. They did not even know who the man was. Sheila called him by no name to identify him, though she called him by 
 
any number of names of intense saccharinity.
 
At length Roger’s voice came through the gloom, as gentle as a shaft of moonlight made audible: “Oh, Sheila.”
 
The silhouette was snipped in two as if by scissors.
 
“Ye-yes, dodther.” She had tried to say “Daddy” and “father” at the same time.
 
Roger’s voice went on in its drawing-roomest drawl: “I know that it is very bad play-writing to have anybody overhear anybody, but your mother and I got home first, 
 
and your dialogue is—well, really, a little of it goes a great way, and we’d like to know the name of your leading man.”
 
Winfield and Sheila both wished that they had drowned that morning. But there was no escape from making their entrance into the living-room, where Roger turned on the 
 
lights. All eyes blinked, rather with confusion than the electric display.
 
The elder Kembles had met Winfield before, but had not suspected him as a son-in-law-to-be. Sheila explained the situation and laid heavy stress on how Winfield had 
 
rescued her from drowning. She rather gave the impression that she had fallen off a liner two days out and that he had jumped overboard and carried her to safety 
 
single-handed.
 
Winfield tried to disclaim the glory, but he managed to gulp up a proposal in phrases he had read somewhere.
 
“I came to ask you for your daughter’s hand.”
 
“It looked to me as if you had both of them around your neck,” Roger sighed. Then he cleared his throat and said: “What do you say, Polly? Do we give our consent?—
 
not that it makes any difference.”
 
Polly sighed. “Sheila’s happiness is the only thing to consider.”
 
“Ah, Sheila’s happiness!” Roger groaned. “That’s a large order. I suppose she has told you, Mr. Wyndham, that she is an actress—or is trying to be?”
 
“Oh yes, sir,” Winfield answered, feeling like a butler asking for a position. “I fell in love with her on the stage.”
 
“Ah, so you are an actor, too.”
 
“Oh no, sir! I’m a manufacturer, or I expect to be.”
 
“And is your factory one that can be carried around with you, or does Sheila intend—”
“Oh, { I’m } going to leave the stage.”
{she’s}  
 
“Hum!” said Roger. “When?”
 
“Right away, I hope,” said Winfield.
 
“I’m off the stage now,” said Sheila. “I’ll just not go back.”
 
“I see,” said Roger, while Polly stared from her idolized child to the terrifying stranger, and wrung her hands before the appalling explosion of this dynamite in 
 
the quiet evening.
 
“Well, mummsy,” Sheila cried, taking her mother in her arms, “why don’t you say something?”
 
“I—I don’t know what to say,” Polly whimpered.
 
Roger’s uneasy eyes were attracted by the living-room table, where there was a comfortable clutter of novels and magazines. A copy of The Munsey was lying there; it 
 
was open, face down. Roger picked it up and offered the open book to Sheila.
 
She and Winfield looked down at a full-page portrait of Sheila.
 
“Had you seen this, Mr.—Mr.—Wingate, is it? It’s a forecast of the coming season and it says—it says—” He produced his eye-glasses and read:
 
“?‘The most interesting announcement among the Reben plans is the statement that Sheila Kemble is to be promoted to stellar honors in a new play written especially 
 
for her. While we deplore the custom of rushing half-baked young beauties into the electric letters, an exception must be made in the case of this rising young artist. 
 
She has not only revealed extraordinary accomplishments and won for herself a great following of admirers throughout the country, but she has also enjoyed a double 
 
heritage in the gifts of her distinguished forebears, who are no less personages than’—et cetera, et cetera.”
 
Sheila and Winfield stared at the page from which Sheila’s public image beamed quizzically at herself and at the youth who aspired to rob her “great following” of 
 
their darling.
 
“What about that?” said Roger.
 
Winfield looked so pitiful to Sheila that she cried, “Well, my ‘great following’ will have to follow somebody else, for I belong to Bret now.”
 
“I see,” said Roger. “And when does the rising young star—er—set? When does the marriage take place?”
 
“Whenever Bret wants me,” said Sheila, and she added “Ooh!” for he squeezed her fingers with merciless gratitude.
 
“Oh, Sheila! Sheila!” said Polly, clutching at her other hand as if she would hold her little girl back from crossing the stile of womanhood.
 
Roger hummed several times in the greatest possible befuddlement. At length he said:
 
“And what do your parents say, Mr. Winston?—or are they—er—living?”
 
“Yes, sir, both of them, thank you. They don’t know anything about it yet, sir.”
 
“And do you think they will be pleased?”
 
“When they know Sheila they can’t help loving her.”
 
“It has happened, I believe,” said Roger, “that parents have not altogether echoed their children’s enthusiasms. And there are still a few people who would not 
 
consider a popular actress an ideal daughter-in-law.”
 
“Oh, they won’t make any trouble!” said Winfield. “They ought to be proud of—of an alliance with such—er—distinguished forebears as you.” He tried to include 
 
Polly and Roger in one look, and he thought the tribute rather graceful.
 
Roger smiled at the bungled compliment and answered, “Well, the Montagues and the Capulets were both prominent families, but that didn’t help Romeo and Juliet much.
 
”
 
Winfield writhed at Roger’s light sarcasm. “It doesn’t matter what they say. I am of age.”
 
“So I judge, but have you an income of your own?”
 
“No, bu............