the blemished side away, and until the bruise becomes a taint that embitters all the pulp--then?--why then leave the fruit and seek something fresher, but not green enough to be astringent to the lips." He decided, finally, "This is a case of nerves, just such an one as women suffer from. I am at the end of a long season, I have overworked, I have lived well but not wisely--no, certainly not wisely! Result--nerves are all at loose ends, imagination over-stimulated, so that a strange face makes an unusually vivid impression. Now the thing for me to do is to see this girl's face again and let a second impression efface the first, since my imagination has, no doubt, been playing me tricks, and the real face will fall far short of the beauty of the imaginary one." So, acting at once upon that idea, he fell back upon the perennial "business telegram" excuse, tore himself away from his jovial companions, and returned to the oven-like city, from which wild horses could not have dragged Mrs. Van Camp until August, when she left with a heavy heart and "wholly in the interest of appearances," she said. He arranged with the old lady for a business chat with her god-daughter next day but one and spent the intervening time superintending the movements of a brigade of cleaners, painters, and paper-hangers whom he had sent charging through the closed theatre--the cleaners routing out dust and dirt from stairs and floors and long-dimmed windows, the painters following and covering up head-marks, finger-marks, scratches, or bruises appearing on the white woodwork and retouching the gilding where it had darkened or worn thin; while the paper-hangers made the boxes not only fresh but most attractive to women, through hanging them with the dull, lustreless velvet paper that makes such a perfect background for a careful toilette and its lovely wearer. It was a dreary job, for surely one can find no more desolate and melancholy place in a great city than a theatre seen by daylight. From the front of the house one receives an impression of loss. The sight of an empty chair is saddening--here are a thousand of them. This dimness and vastness, this gilding and crystal and metal that does not glisten nor glitter. The depressing silence of checked music, of vanished laughter--even an actor shivers at sight of the auditorium of a closed theatre; it is like looking on the face of a dead pleasure. But to turn about and look at the stage is even worse, so distressingly complete is the betrayal of its shabby deceptions. It is as though an admired, brilliant, and successful liar stood there who had been found out and suddenly reduced to telling the bare, bald truth. No, a day in a closed theatre during the house-cleaning period is not an enlivening experience, and Thrall told himself that that was why he looked forward so eagerly to his late afternoon call at Mrs. Van Camp's, where he was to have his business chat with Sybil.