The brand-new couple forgot problems of this and every other sort in the raptures and supernal contentments of belonging to each other utterly and forever.  
The notifying of their parents was one of the unpleasantest of tasks. They put it off till the next day. Sheila’s father and mother had already begun their tour to 
 
the Coast and the news found them in the Middle West.
 
Sheila telegraphed to them:
 
Hope my good news wont seem bad news to you Bret and I were quietly married yesterday please keep it secret both terribly terribly happy play opens Grand Rapids Monday 
 
best love from us both to you both.
 
Her good news was sad enough for them. It filled them with forebodings. That phrase “terribly happy” seemed uncannily appropriate. Between the acts of their comedy 
 
that night they clung to each other and wept, moaning: “Poor child! The poor child!”
 
Winfield’s situation was summed up in a telegram to his home.
 
Happiest man on earth married only woman on earth yesterday please send your blessings and forgiveness and five hundred dollars.
 
Bret’s mother fainted with a little wail and his father’s weak heart indulged in wild syncopations. When Mrs. Winfield was resuscitated she lay on a couch, weeping 
 
tiny old tears and whimpering:
 
“The poor boy! The poor boy!”
 
The father sat bronzed with sick anger. He had built up a big industry and the son he had reared to carry it after him had turned out a loafer, a chaser of actresses, 
 
and now the worthless dependent on one of them.
 
Charles Winfield pondered like an old Brutus if it were not his solemn duty to punish the renegade with disinheritance; to divert his fortune to nobler channels and 
 
turn over his industry to a nephew who was industrious and loyal to the factory.
 
But he sent the five hundred dollars. In his day he had eloped with his own wife and alienated his own parents and hers. But that had been different. Now his mouth was 
 
full of the ashes of his hopes.
 
Reben was yet to be told. Sheila said that he had troubles enough on his mind and was in such a state of temper, anyway, that it would be kinder to him not to tell 
 
him. This was not altogether altruism.
 
She dreaded the storm he would raise and longed for a portable cyclone-cellar. She knew that he would denounce her for outrageous dishonor in her treatment of him, and 
 
from his point of view there was no justifying her unfealty. But she felt altogether assured that she had accomplished a higher duty. In marrying her true love she was 
 
fulfilling her contract with God and Nature and Life, far greater managers than any Reben.
 
She had, therefore, for her final rapture the exquisite tang of stolen sweets. And to the mad completeness of the escapade was added the hallowing sanction of law and 
 
the Church.
 
It was a honeymoon, indeed, but pitilessly interrupted by the tasks of departure, and pitifully brief.
 
The question of whether or not her husband—how she did read that word “husband”!—should travel on the same train with her to Grand Rapids was a hard riddle.
 
Both of them were unready to publish the delirious secret of their wedding.
 
There was to be a special sleeping-car for the company. For Sheila as the star the drawing-room was reserved, while Reben had claimed the stateroom at the other end of 
 
the coach.
 
To smuggle Bret into her niche would be too perilous. For her to travel in another car with him was equally impossible. If he went on the same train he might be 
 
recognized in the dining-car. For her to take another train would not be permitted. A manager has to keep his flock together.
 
At length they were driven to the appalling hardship of separation for the journey. Bret would take an earlier train, and arrange for their sojourn at the quietest 
 
hotel in Grand Rapids. She would join him there, and no one would know of her tryst.
 
So they agreed, and she saw him off on the noon express. Of all the topsy-turvy households ever heard of, this was the worst! But they parted as fiercely as if he were 
 
going to the wars.
 
The company car left at five o’clock in the afternoon, and was due in Grand Rapids at one the next day. Eldon and Pennock alone knew that the young star was a young 
 
bride. Both of them regarded Sheila with such woeful reproach that she ordered Pennock to change her face or jump off the train, and she shut herself away from Eldon 
 
in her drawing-room.
 
But she was soon routed out by Batterson for a reading rehearsal of a new scene that Prior had concocted. She was so afraid of Eldon’s eyes and so absent-minded with 
 
thoughts of her courier husband that Batterson thought she had lost her wits.
 
Twice she called Eldon “Bret” instead of “Ned,” the name of his r?le. That was how he learned who it was she had married.
 
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.
 
Sheila was aflame with impatience, but she could not leave. Before the council of war was finished the general rehearsal was called—a distracting ordeal, with the 
 
company crowded to the footlights and struggling to remember lines and cues in the battle-like clamor of getting the scenery in, making the new drops fast to the ropes 
 
and hoisting them away to the flies. Hammers were pounding, canvases going up, stage-hands shouting and interrupting.
 
The rehearsal was vexatious enough in all conscience, but its crudities were aggravated by the icy realization that this was the final rehearsal before the production. 
 
In a few hours the multitude of empty chairs would be occupied by the big jury.
 
Under this strain the actors developed disheartening lapses of memory that promised complications at night. When the lines had been parroted over, Reben spoke a few 
 
words like a dubious king addressing his troops before battle. The stage-manager sang out with unwonted comradery:
 
“Go to it, folks, and good luck!”
 
Sheila dashed to the stage door, only to be called again by Reben. He offered to walk to the hotel with her. She dared not refuse. He invited her to dine with him. She 
 
said that she would be dining in her room............