No longer the happy wayfarer, but an anxious, downcast and distraught man, on his soul a shadow, he found his way to his seat—his first time in any actual theater. The whirl of it all, the light, the warmth, the color, the music, at first were things rather of torture to him. Where was she? But presently she came, bowing, smiling, light-footed—it was she, her very self! Yes, these were her eyes, dark and large as ever. Her little mouth, turned up a-corner, was as sweet as ever. Her dark hair curled as it did that other time. Her straight young figure was the same, with all its tender curves. Above all, her frank smile, her compelling air of comradery, were just the same as then, that time, two years ago. She had the same little habit of balancing up and down on her toes, impatient for the music to give her her cue. Her little chuckling laugh of sheer enjoyment in herself and in life was just the same. She was still the very spirit of life and joy she had been yonder, two years ago—two centuries ago it seemed to David Joslin! Then he had been another man. And now—he was again that other man! As to the play, so-called, it was nothing to him, and he knew not how long it endured. The concordance of the strings and brasses meant naught to-night, though otherwise they might have meant much indeed, new as they were to his acquaintance. He sat mute, his eyes fixed steadily upon one figure upon the stage, the sum total of the sensuous appeal lost for him in the charm of its central figure. And then, electric, a clash in the music touched him to the marrow. The orchestra leader waved his baton. A few violins, a flute or two, struck into the opening bars of an air that David Joslin knew! Polly Pendleton was at that moment off-stage, but now ran tripping from the wings, smiling, shrugging up her scant shoulder strap as she came. Her violin was under her arm. She waved a hand to quiet the enthusiasm, and played with the orchestra a few staves of the air. “You’re the Only Man for Me”—that was what Polly Pendleton would play, of course. Did not David Joslin know? When she came to the chorus, she stepped down to the footlights and extended her two round, white arms, bare to the shoulder—her slender, up-curved little fingers reaching almost to the face of the bald-headed leader of the orchestra, himself of a family of eight. To him she sang, her eyes dark and pleading, her little feet tiptoeing, her voice no less than blandishment itself—“For you are my Baby—you are my Baby—you’re the only, only, _only_ man for me!” And then Polly Pendleton laughed with her audience at the jest of it. She ran off-stage, but must come back again, to be sure. This time she raised her hands and her eyes to a solid-looking citizen, who sat in a proscenium box—a banker and a leading figure of the town, it chanced, well known to all in the audience. To him also, pleadingly, bewitchingly, she asserted, “You’re the only, only, _only_ man for me!”