So, with these additions to his sure clientèle, the season closed, and Manager Thrall, at first amused and then annoyed by the haunting memory of a twice seen face, accepted, as had been his wont in former summers, an invitation to join a gay yachting party, only to find himself more or less bored. Eating too much, drinking too much, and smoking like a chimney palled on him. The stories told were all frankly old or poorly revamped, and he grumbled one night that "chestnuts in summer-time were an anomaly!" A young sap-head, dizzy with champagne, gazing at him in heavy-eyed admiration, remarked: "Isn't he deep? Must be college man, eh--Thrall? I'm pretty f-fly myself; I know 'chestnut' a-and 'summer,' but 'n-nomaly' puts me out in the first round!" And with a pencil and paper he went about almost tearfully, begging people to explain the meaning of the word "anomaly"; and each one appealed to wrote out a more wildly absurd definition than had the man before him, which was a highly intellectual amusement indeed. Only one thing had power to lay, for a little while, the lovely, dark-eyed ghost haunting the actor, and that was poker--the great American game played with the aid of the gayly colored pasteboards and an astonishing vocabulary, containing, among other things, "kitties," "antes," and "lob--" no, "jack-pots." A long line of "flushes," "straights"--royal, bob-tailed; and people "came in" and "went out" and "stood pat," and "opened things" and "shut them," and, indeed, did so much in the course of the wonderful game that it claimed the whole attention and left no room for memories of any kind. Still poker could not go on all the time, and finally when one night all hands went ashore to attend a hotel-hop, Thrall, the waltzer par excellence, suddenly realized that each frisky young matron, each pretty débutante who so readily honored him, was being measured by the standard of Sybil's beauty. This one he found slender to the point of angularity; that one plump to the verge of lost outlines; another pretty but crudely overdressed; while the fair face that seemed floating before him as on waves of melody, with the almost sullen red mouth that could flash into smiles of such penetrating sweetness, the sensitive color, wavering, fading, flaming again, the level, tragic brows and dark eyes, in which burning passion still slept, but lightly--he knew but lightly--was, he told himself, "simply incomparable"! And then he pulled up short, saying, angrily: "What in the devil's name has come to me? Am I a green boy to be bowled over and left sprawling in the dust by a glance from a pair of fine eyes? Eyes owned by an inexperienced girl, too, a mere miss--one of those creatures who, knowing nothing, suspect everything, and keep you ever on guard? Bah! I hate green fruit! let me have it ripe, with all its florid coloring and rich mellowness--even if many rough experiences have left a bruised spot here or there. One can turn