Upon the reiterated testimony of the Oldest Inhabitant, Our Square had never before witnessed such scenes or heard such sounds of revelry by night as the Bonnie Lassie's surprise party, given for her by her friends of the far-away world. None of us was bidden in at first, as the Bonnie Lassie had not the inviting in her hands. But to her—little loyalist that she is!—a celebration without her own neighbors was unthinkable; so she sent her messengers forth and gathered us in from our beds, from Schwartz's, from Lavansky's Pinochle Parlors, from the late shift of the “Socialist Weekly Battlecry,” and even from the Semi-Annual SoirÉe and Ball of the Sons of Gentlemen of Goerck Street, far out on our boundaries of influence; and though we wore no fancier garb than our best, we made a respectable showing, indeed.

Along with the early comers, and while Cyrus the Gaunt was still putting the final touches to his preparation, there appeared at the hospitable door an unexpected guest, a woman of sixty with a strong, bent figure, and a square face lighted by gleaming eyes with fixed lines about them. The black-hued Undertaker who had constituted himself master of ceremonies met her at the door, and immediately hustled her within.

“While I have not the privilege of this lady's personal acquaintance,” he announced, “I have the honor of presenting, ladies and gentlemen, the eminent and professional chaperon, Mrs. Sparkles.”

The newcomer paused, blinking and irresolute. “But I did not know—” she began, in a faintly foreignized accent From a far corner the Bonnie Lassie spied her, and flew across the floor, flushed, radiant, and confused. “You!” she cried—and there was something in her voice that drew upon the pair curious looks from the other guests. “Oh, Madame! Why didn't you let me know?”

The newcomer set her finger to her lips. “I am incognita. What is it the somber person called me? Mrs. Sparkles? Yes.” The Bonnie Lassie nodded her comprehension. “If I had known that you were making fÊte this evening—I cannot see your work now.”

“Indeed, you can. I'll shut just us two into the studio. They won't miss me.” She gently pushed the new guest through a side door, which she closed after them. Confronted with the little sculptor's work, the visitor moved about with a swift certainty of judgment, praising this bit with a brief word, shrugging her shoulders over that, indicating by a single touch of the finger the salient defect of another, while her hostess followed her with anxious eyes.

“Not bad,” murmured the critic. “You have learned much. What is under that sheet?”

“Experiments,” answered the girl reluctantly.

The woman swept the covering aside. Beneath were huddled a number of studies, some finished, others in the rough, ungrouped.

“All the same subject, n'est-ce-pas?”

“Yes.”

The visitor examined them carefully. “Very interesting. Any more of this?”

“Some notes in pencil.”

“Let me see them.”

The Bonnie Lassie drew out and submitted a sheaf of papers.

“You have done very badly with this,” was the verdict, after concentrated study. “Or else—you have worked hard and honestly upon it?”

“Harder than on anything I've done.”

“There are signs of that, too. What is it you are aiming at? What is the subject? Inside, I mean?” She tapped her forehead and regarded with her luminous stare the eager girl-face before her.

“Why, I hardly know. At first it was one thing, then it changed. I had thought of doing him as 'The Pioneer.' 'Something lost beyond the ranges,' you know.” The woman nodded. “Then later, I wanted to do 'The Last American,' and I modeled him for that.”

“Good!” The older woman's endorsement was emphatic. “How Lincoln-like the formation of the face is, here.” She touched one of the unfinished bits. “That's the American of it. Or is it? Albrecht DÜrer did the same thing in his ideal Knight four centuries ago. You know it? It's like a portrait of Lincoln. Did you consciously mould that line in?”

“Ah!” The girl contemplated her own work with glowing eyes. “That's the haunting resemblance I felt but couldn't catch when I first saw my model.”

“It isn't in most of these.”

“My fault. It must have been there, underneath, all the time.”

“Hm! You consider those pretty faithful studies?”

“As faithful as I could make them. But I haven't been able to catch and fix the face. It's most provoking,” she added fretfully, “but I'm constantly having to remodel.” Before she had finished, the elderly woman's swift hands were busy with the figures, manipulating them here and there, until they were presently set out in a single row with the sketches interspersed. “Read from left to right,” she said curtly. “Is not that the order of time in which the work was done?”

“Pure magic!” breathed the girl. “How could you know?”

“How could I help but know? Child, child! Can't you see you have the biggest subject ready to your hand that any artist could pray for?” The girl looked her question mutely. “The man is making himself. How? God knows—the God that helps all real work. Look! See how the lines of grossness there”—she touched the first figure in her marshaled line —“have planed out here.” The swift finger found a later study. “How could you miss it! The upbuilding of character, resolve, manhood, and with it all something gentler and finer softening it. You have half-done it, but only half, because you have not understood. Why have you not understood?”

“Because I'm not a genius.”

“Who knows? To have half-done it is much. The master-genius, Life, has been carving that face out before your eyes. You need but follow.”

“Tell me what to do.”

“Leave it alone for six months. Come back and take the face as it will be then.”

“Then will be too late,” said the girl in a low voice.

“What!” cried the critic, startled. “Your model isn't dying, is he?”

“Oh, no. I—I had something else in mind.”

“Dismiss it. Have nothing else in mind but to finish this.” She paused. “I have seen all I need to. Let us return to your friends.”

Hardly had the hostess seated her guest in the most comfortable corner of the big divan when there was a stir at the door, and a rangy, big-boned figure, clad in the unmistakable garb of honest labor, appeared, blinking a little at the lights. Instantly the Undertaker, in his rÔle of official announcer, dashed forward to greet him. “Gentlemen and ladies,” he proclaimed, “introducing Mr. Casey Jones, late of the Salt Lake Line.”

“Sing it, you Son of Toil!” shouted somebody, and Cyrus the Gaunt promptly obliged, in a clear and robust baritone, leading the chorus which came in jubilantly.

The elderly “Mrs. Sparkles” was not interested in the harmony; but she was interested in the face of her hostess, which had flushed a startled pink. She asked a question under cover of the music.

“That is your model, is it not?”

“Yes.”

“What is he in real life?”

“As you see him.”

“In—deed? What is he doing it for?”

“Two and a half a day, I believe.”

“Quite enough. But why?”

“I never asked him.” And the Bonnie Lassie tripped over to her newest guest, leaving her next-to-newest quite busy with thought.

Owing to the demands upon a hostess,

Cyrus the Gaunt saw very little of her in the brief hour remaining to him. One dance he succeeded in claiming.

“You see,” he remarked, “I came to your party anyway, although uninvited.”

“I didn't give it. It was a surprise,” she explained. “But the job?”

“They've put me on an hour later.”

“You still like it?”

“It limits one socially more than being a model,” he replied solemnly.

“But you are sticking to it?” she persisted.

“Oh, yes, I'm sticking to it, all right.”

“Even if—No matter what happens?”

“What is going to happen?” he asked gravely.

“Nothing,” she said hurriedly. “But it's the job for the job's sake with you now, isn't it?”

“I like the feel of it, if that's what you mean. The feel of being competent to hold it down.”

She nodded with content in her eyes. But he was troubled.

“You had something in mind—” he began, when another partner claimed her, while he was dragged off to assist in an improvised glee-club.

His time was up all too soon, and without chance of a further word from her, other than a formal farewell. In the little rear hallway whither he had made his way through his protesting fellow-revelers, he reached up for his coat, and felt something lightly brush the top of his head. He looked up. It was a sprig of mistletoe. At the same moment two firm hands closed over his eyes, and light, swift lips just grazed his cheek.

Cyrus the Gaunt fell a-trembling. He turned slowly, and found himself confronting a total stranger. The stranger had gray hair and a tired face lighted by crinkly eyes. “Oh!” said Cyrus the Gaunt with an irrepressible bitterness of disappointment.

“Frankness,” observed his salutant, “may or may not be a compliment to the object of it.” Cyrus remained mute. “Who did you hope it was?” Silence seemed still the best policy. “If you are offended”—the eyes twinkled with added keenness—“I will apologize honorably.”

“Let me do it for you,” said Cyrus the Gaunt politely, and kissed the unknown square upon the lips.

She drew back. “Well!” she began; then she laughed. “The entente cordiale having been established, what are you doing here, Cyrus Staten?”

He gasped and gaped. “Do I know you?”

“Having neither memory nor manners, you do not. But I spent weeks at your country place when you were a boy, painting your father. Permit me to introduce myself.” And she gave a name so great that even Cyrus's comprehensive carelessness of art was not ignorant of it.

“Great snakes!” he ejaculated. “I—I'm sorry I kissed you.”

“Oh, I'm human. I rather liked it,” she chuckled, “even though I am old and stately. But how have you contrived to preserve your incognito?”

“Easy enough. This is another world. Look out!” he added as the curtain behind them moved. “Somebody's coming.” The hanging swung aside and the Bonnie Lassie emerged. “Oh!” she said in surprise. “Do you know each other?”

“We were becoming acquainted when you interrupted,” replied the woman. She turned a disconcerting gaze upon her hostess. “Where did you get him?” she demanded, exactly as if Cyrus weren't there. “Oh, please!” cried the girl.

“Don't mind me,” said Cyrus politely, sensible that something was going on which he didn't grasp. “I'm used to it.” He turned to the mighty artist. “You see, in real life I'm a studio model.”

“Are you?” retorted the genius. “I thought you were an engineer. Now I begin to suspect you are a fraud. Well, I have something to say to Miss Prim, here. Run you away and play with your job.”

“So that's your young Lincoln,” she observed, as Cyrus moodily accepted his dismissal, and passed out.

“He doesn't know it.”

“You have missed even more than I thought, in him.”

“I've done my best,” said the girl dispiritedly. “He's too big for little me.”

“Hm! You haven't told me yet where you got him.”

“'The wild wind blew him to my close-barred door,'” quoted the girl.

“A good many wild winds have blown about Cyrus Staten from time to time.”

“Who?”

“Cyrus Staten; don't you know him?”

“No, I picked him up from the bench in Our Square.”

“Which the Statens used to own, by the way. Well, the facilis descensus of an idle waster from the world of white lights and black shadows to a park-bench is nothing new.”

“Does he look like an idle waster?”

“He does not. Therein lies a miracle. What is he doing now?”

“Running the steam-roller, outside.” The face of the girl melted into lovely and irrepressible mirth.

“Ah! That explains much. But not all. What is your part in this?”

“You have seen it.” She nodded backward toward the studio.

“Not that. As a woman? What have you been doing to that boy to make him what he is?”

The girl took her soft lip grievously between her teeth for a moment before answering. “I've been playing my child's tricks with a real man—and now I'm being sorry.”

“And paying for it?”

The Bonnie Lassie's head drooped.

“Is he paying for it, too?”

“No.”

“No? Well, when I played a little surprise on him and kissed him under the mistletoe, I thought that tall and massive youth was going to faint away like a school-miss in my supporting arms, until he saw who it was. What do you suppose his expectations—”

“You had no right to take such an advantage,” flashed the girl, turning crimson.

“So?” The great woman smiled. “But I think my own thoughts. When one pays, or the other pays, that is well. It is the chance of the play. But when both pay—oh, that is wrong, wrong, wrong as wrong can be!”

“I can't help it,” said the girl, very low. “There is a previous debt.” And she turned aside a face so woe-begone that her interrogator forbore further pressure.

“At least,” she said, “the artist must complete the work, at whatever cost to the woman. You will finish that?” She jerked her head toward the studio.

“I—I suppose so. If I can.”

On the way home the genius caught a glimpse of Cyrus the Gaunt upon his triumphal chariot, and halted her auto the better to laugh. As the lumbering, clamoring monster drew opposite, she signaled. Cyrus did something abstruse to the mechanism, which groaned and clanked itself into stillness.

“Young man,” she hailed, “I have a message for you.”

“From whom?” said Cyrus hopefully. “From myself. This is it: Be careful.”

“I am,” said Cyrus with conviction, “the carefulest captain that ever ploughed the stormy pave.”

“Be careful,” she repeated, disregarding his interpretation, “or she'll make a man of you yet. The process is sometimes painful—like most creative processes, Home, Joseph.”

Many of the Bonnie Lassie's outlander guests passed Cyrus the Gaunt that night, but none other identified or noticed him. The latest departures were two heavily swathed youths who paused to light cigarettes in the lee of Cyrus's iron steed.

“Some little farewell party, wasn't it?” the engineer overheard them say. “Why wasn't the happy Bascom there?”

“Not back from Europe yet. I understand Morris Cartwright fixed things up, and the engagement is to be formally announced on his return.”

“It's a shame,” growled the first speaker. “Bascom's all right, but he's old enough to be her father. Wasn't she a dream and a vision to-night!”

“It was one of those legacy engagements, I believe. Dead-father's-wish sort of thing. All right, I suppose, so long as there's no one else. Who was the engineer guy? He seemed to be a reg'lar feller.”

The twain passed on, leaving Cyrus the Gaunt stiff and stricken in his seat. How he got through the next hour he hardly knew. He remembered vaguely a protest from sundry citizens who resented being charged off the cross-walks by a zigzagging juggernaut, a query from Terry the Cop whether he was off his feed, and the startled face of old man Sittser, who paused to pass the time of night on his way home from the late shift on the linotype and was incontinently cursed for his pains. Full consciousness of the practical world was brought back to Cyrus by the purring of a sleek auto close at hand as he curved out at the corner for his straightaway course. He was just gathering momentum when he caught sight of the Bonnie Lassie's face, white and wistful, soft-eyed and miserable, confronting darkness and vacancy from within the luxurious limousine.

Well, nobody can catch a sixty-horsepower motor-car with a ten-ton steamroller.

Cyrus, to do him justice, tried his best. They stopped one dollar and forty cents out of his Saturday's envelope for what he and the roller did to the barriers and lanterns. By the time he had swung into the cross-street, trailing wreckage, the Bonnie Lassie was out of sight and out of his world.