“Arthur, I’ll marry you when you like,” she said, laying a hand upon his arm.
“Sylvia, what a wonderful Christmas present!”
“To us both,” she whispered.
Then on an impulse she dragged him back to the house and proclaimed their engagement, which meant the opening of new bottles of champagne and the drinking of so many healths that it was three o’clock before the party broke up. Nor was there any likelihood of anybody’s being able to say “inadvertently” by the time he had reached the corner of the street.
Arthur had begged Sylvia to come down to Dulwich on Christmas day, and Mrs. Madden rejoiced over the decision they had reached at last. There were one or two things to be considered, the most important of which was the question of money. Sylvia had spent the last penny of what was left of Morera’s money in launching herself, and she owed nearly two hundred pounds besides. Arthur had saved nothing. Both of them, however, had been offered good engagements for the spring, Arthur to tour as lead in one of the Vanity productions, which might mean an engagement at the Vanity itself in the autumn; Sylvia to play a twenty minutes’ turn at all the music-halls of a big circuit. It seemed unsatisfactory to marry and immediately afterward to separate, and they decided each to take the work that had been offered, to save all the money possible, and to aim at both playing in London next autumn, but in any case to be married in early June when the tours would end. They should then have a couple of months to themselves. Mrs. Madden wanted them to be married at once; but the other way seemed more prudent, and Sylvia, having once made up her mind, was determined to be practical and not to run the risk of spoiling by financial worries the beginning of their real life together. Her marriage in its orderliness and forethought and simplicity of intention was to compensate for everything that had gone before. Mrs. Madden thought they were both of them being too deliberate, but then she had run away once with her father’s groom and must have had a fundamentally impulsive, even a reckless temperament.
The engagement was announced with an eye to the most advantageous publicity that is the privilege of being servants of the public. One was able to read everywhere of a theatrical romance or more coldly of a forthcoming theatrical marriage; nearly all the illustrated weeklies had two little oval photographs underneath which ran the legend:
INTERESTING ENGAGEMENT
We learn that Miss Sylvia Scarlett, who recently registered such an emphatic success in her original entertainment at the Pierian Hall, will shortly wed Mr. Arthur Madden, whom many of our readers will remember for his rendering of “Somebody is sitting in the sunset” at the Frivolity Theater.
In one particularly intimate paper was a short interview headed:
ACTRESS’S DELIGHTFUL CANDOR