WHAT first struck you about the house was that it frowned. Not angrily, but with a kind of dull scorn. Perhaps this was its way of emphasizing its superior aloofness from the other houses in Our Square which had gone down in the social scale while it maintained its aristocracy untainted. It was squat and broad and drab, like the first Varick who had built it, and the succeeding Varicks who had inherited and dwelt in it even to the sixth and seventh generations. Being numbered 13, it would naturally have a sinister repute; and this was not improved by the two suicides which had marked its occupancy; suicides not of despair or remorse or fury, but of cold, grim disgust. Then there was the episode of old Vernam Varick, who dabbled in diabolical mixtures in his secret room on the third floor front under the tutelage of no less an instructor than the Devil, and, having quarreled with Old Nick over a moot point in alchemy, chased him out of the window and followed, himself, to the accompaniment of a loud and sulphurous detonation. What became of His Satanic Majesty has never been properly determined, but old Ver-nam arrived upon the pavement in due time, crumpled up, and thereafter circulated in a wheeled chair, sniffing about after real-estate investments to pass the time. He it was whose purchases of uptown property (when anything above Forty-second Street was “uptown”) severely reprehended by the rest of the clan, subsequently reestablished the Varick fortunes, piling up riches beyond the imagination of Our Square. Except that he had more imagination, he was a pattern of all the Varicks, each broad and squat of architecture like the house they dwelt in; each, if possible, more crabbed and pigheaded and stupidly haughty than his predecessor. In time, his son, heritor of the qualities of the breed, grew up and married. And then the dull generations burst into flower in Paula Varick. So the Varicks put her in a cage.

Old Vernam built the cage out of gas pipe and thick-meshed wire and established it on the roof. From my front window, looking diagonally across Our Square, I command a view of it. How well I remember the day that little Paula was put into it! A black-and-white-banded nurse led her in by the hand, held up an admonitory finger for half a minute of directions, and disappeared down the scuttle door, leaving her alone in a remote world. One might have expected the little girl to cry. She didn't. She set about playing, like a happy little squirrel. Presently there floated across the tree-tops a strange and alien sound for that grim mansion to be making—a sweet, light, joyous, childish piping. The little Paula was singing.

Her song disturbed young Carlo and me at our lesson. Carlo was my one educational luxury. An assistant professor of a forgotten branch of learning, already in middle age, as I was then, who ekes out his income by tutoring, cannot well afford to take pupils for love. But Carlo's father had paid in the beginning, and, when he could no longer pay, the boy's vivid, leaping imagination and his passionate love for all that was fine and true in reading had captivated me. I could not let him go. So we kept up the lessons, and ranged the field of the classics, Greek and Latin, English, French, and German, together. He was to be a poet, I foresaw, or perhaps a dramatist, and I believe I bragged of him unconscionably to my associates. Well, they are kindly souls and have forborne to taunt the prophet! Carlo's father was a Northern Italian, the second son of a noble family, who quarreled with the head of the clan and came to this country and a top floor in Our Square to paint masterpieces, and subsequently died at three o'clock one winter morning, pressing another man's coat. MacLachan the Tailor, then just starting his Home of Fashion, had given him the work to save the pair from being evicted, after their money gave out. At the last the elder Trentano took to drink. Then Carlo got jobs as a model, for he was strong and beautiful like a young woods creature. But he let nothing interfere with our lessons.

Paula, the happy singer, did interfere, however. From time to time my pupil's eyes wandered from his book to fix themselves with a puzzled gaze on the roof beyond the tree-tops. Curiosity proved too much for him at length.

“Dominie!” he said.

“Well?”

“Why do they put the little girl in a cage?”

“To keep her from falling off the roof.”

“Why do they put her on the roof?”

“To play.”

“Why doesn't she play in Our Square?”

“She is not allowed to play with the children in Our Square.”

Carlo pondered this. A theory born of temporary local conditions occurred to him. “Has she got measles?”

This was an easy way out. To enlighten Carlo as to the reasons why the descendant of all the Varicks was not permitted to take part in the degenerated social activities of Our Square, would be to undermine my carefully instilled doctrine of the blessings of democracy where all are free and equal. Therefore with mendacious, though worthy, intent I answered:—

“Not measles, exactly.”

“Oh!” said Carlo. “She must get lonesome.”

“Doubtless.”

The cheery singing had ceased now, and the child was busy with some other concern. Carlo's sharper vision identified it.

“She's setting a tea-table.”

“Is she?”

“And nobody will come to tea at it, will they?”

“Perhaps her dolls.”

“I don't see any dolls.” His lustrous eyes brooded on the lonely little hostess. “Dominie, do you think she'd like it if I came?”

“Are you thinking of storming the house?” I asked, amused.

“That's our roof there.” He pointed to a shabby structure overtopping the squat Varick domicile by some ten feet, and separated from it by a well, four or five feet broad. “I could lean over and speak to her, couldn't I?”

“I hardly think her family would approve.”

“Her family are mean,” declared Carlo heatedly, “to shut her up in a cage.”

“Come back from the realms of romance,” I bade him sternly, “and attend to the lesson.”

Before it was over the black-and-white-banded nurse had retrieved her charge and taken her below.

Three days later I beheld two small figures on the Varick roof. One was inside the cage; one outside. They appeared to be engaged in amicable discourse. The caged figure was little Paula. As to the free one, I could scarcely believe my eyes which tried to assure me that it was Carlo Trentano. It had come about in this way: For two days rain had kept the little prisoner from the roof. She was swaying to and fro on a rocking-horse, crooning to herself, and this was the burden of her improvised chant:—

Perhaps she had sung it over ten or twelve times when her wish materialized from behind the broad chimney at the rear. She heard his footfall first and then her sweet, wondering eyes beheld the visitor, a shabby, clean, and marvelous boy, some years her elder and about twice her size. Nevertheless, with the superiority of sex she immediately addressed him as “Little Boy.”

“Little Boy, where did you come from?”

“Up there,” replied her caller, pointing.

The caged one turned her solemn regard “up there” and saw a great, white, softly rolling mass floating in a sky of azure.

“From that?” she inquired.

Carlo considered the cloud and was pleased with it as a source. “Yes,” he said.

“It looks soft and sleepy,” she observed, after a more critical consideration.

They contemplated each other in a silence which threatened to become a deadlock, when he broke it.

“Do you like gum?” he asked.

“What's gum?”

“Chewing-gum, of course.”

“I don't know what that is.”

He stared at her in utter incredulity. “You honestly never chewed gum?” A shake of the tawny head answered him. “Nor ate an all-day sucker?” Another shake. “Nor played marbles?” Still another mute denial. “Nor flew kites, nor pegged the cat, nor rollered on the asphalt, nor spun tops?” The questions came too fast for detailed answer, but the child's face grew more and more dismal as she was thus led, step by step, to confront a wasted life. Her inquisitor drew a long breath. “What did they put you in for?” he asked. “In where?”

“In that cage.”

“To play.” Her inventiveness rose in arms to offset the recondite and mysterious joys which he had enumerated, and with it her spirits. “I play I'm a wild animal. Gr-rr-rr-rr! If I could get out I'd eat you up, Little Boy.”

He played up to her. “I know what you are. You're a tiger. A big stripy tiger.

“Say some more,” she demanded imperiously. “I like poetry.”

“That's all I remember. I'll tell you; I'll be a keeper, and I'll come to the cage to feed you.” He felt in his pocket and produced a fresh stick of gum which he thrust through the wire meshes. Being a realist, Paula promptly bit him on the finger.

“Ow!” he exclaimed and dropped the gum. She pounced upon it, growling ferociously. “You play awfully hard, don't you?” he observed, caressing the mark of a sharp little tooth.

“You have to when you don't have anybody but yourself to play with, or it isn't real,” replied the child with unconscious pathos. “Now I'm going to eat this all up!”

“Don't swallow it,” he warned. “You just chew it. It's gum.”

“Um-m-m!” mumbled the Tiger appreciatively. “I like it. I like you. When do you have to go back to your cloud?” She looked up apprehensively at that fleecy domicile which was moving rapidly away.

“Oh, any time. No, I'll tell you,” he added confidentially; “I didn't really come from the cloud. I came from that roof up there.”

“How?”

“Down a rope.”

“Did you? I like that almost as well. Where did you get the rope?”

“It was over the fire escape. I live on the top floor there.”

“S'posen you'd fall right down between the two houses,” surmised the little Tiger.

“Then I'd be killed.” This, as a matter of fact, was highly probable. But Carlo, like most of the highland Italians, was strong, supple, and daring; ingenious, too, for he had made loops in his rope to help him climb up again.

Paula the Tiger was now considering cognate matters with appropriate gravity. “I think I'd rather have you live in the cloud,” she decided. “Angels live in clouds. If you 're an angel, you won't fall and get killed,” she continued, finding a kindly refuge in theology. “I'd rather have you an angel.”

“All right. I'll be an angel,” he agreed. “Nurse doesn't let me play with little boys and girls. Maybe she wouldn't let me play with an angel either. I think you'd better come when nurse isn't here. When will you come again, Angel?”

“To-morrow.”

“Must I give back the nice gum?” she asked anxiously.

“No. But you'd better leave it in your cage. Grown-ups don't like gum around,” he instructed her with precocious worldly wisdom.

“Thank you, Angel. Good-bye, Angel”

“Good-bye, little girl.”

“Gr-rr-rr-rr!” The growl was a savage reminder of the dramatic proprieties.

Carlo was quick of apprehension. “Good-bye, Tiger,” he amended. And the Tiger purred.

Often thereafter I saw them, at the hour when the banded nurse took her outing, playing together on opposite sides of the barrier. Many, various, and ingenious were the diversions which Carlo the free found to amuse the captivity of Paula the caged. There were delightful things to be contrived out of knotted strings, in which Carlo was of incomparable skill. He invented a game of marbles which could be played by opponents on different sides of a twelve-foot steel mesh; an abstruse pastime, but apparently interesting, since it developed into an almost daily contest in which, to judge from the joyous prancings about the cage at the conclusion, she was invariably allowed to win. Also, there were gifts of candy shared, and the delights of the chase with a bean-shooter for weapon and the indignant sparrows for quarry, and instructions in the principles of kinetic stasis as exemplified by the rotary or spinning top. All of which was doubtless very wicked and deceitful and clandestine, and, being so, should have been stopped by a word from me before disaster could come. For, any day, Carlo might slip from that swaying rope and break his precious neck. Or the Varicks might learn of what was going on above their heads, and banish the little Tiger from her happy cage, or perhaps even wholly from the contaminated atmosphere of Our Square. This last would have been a blow to me, for she also was my pupil, and a profitable one, since her father, Putnam Varick, a dry, snuffy, stern, lethargic, ill-natured, liverish man, paid me liberally to come five times a week and give her a grounding in Latin and French. But I could not find it in my heart to deprive my little Paula of her one taste of real childhood.

Discovery was, of course, inevitable. One day Paula came into the dim and solemn Varick library where lessons were conducted with her big, wistful, gray eyes all wet and wincing, and her queer, sprightly little face like a mask of grief. Behind her came nurse with the expression of a hanging judge. The culprit, it appeared, had been found in the possession of contraband goods—to wit, a wad of much-chewed gum. Worse, it had been discovered in a most inappropriate place.

“I puh-hut it in my huh-huh-hair,” wept the sorrowful little Tiger, “and it stu-huh-huck.”

“She won't tell me where she got it,” said nurse.

“I did. I to-hold you an angel gave it to me,” declared the Tiger, clinging with pathetic resolution to her drama of the roof.

Nurse sniffed. Her theological imagination did not extend to heavenly visitors who dispensed that kind of manna. It was her opinion for what it was worth (sniff) that somebody had been throwing things (sniff) on the roof. Next time it might be (sniff) poison. Nurse did have an imagination of a kind.

It wasn't poison next time. It was a kite. Carlo had flown it from his own roof and had brought the twine down in his teeth, and had passed the ball through the netting to the Tiger. Oh, the thrill of ecstasy running up her arm, to spread and glow on live wires through every nerve, as she felt for the first time the tug and tremor of the beautiful, soaring, captive thing swaying far, far above her, higher than the highest roof-top she could see, higher than the biggest mountain in her geography, as high as the vanished cloud whence the beneficent angel of her happy drama had descended to brighten a hitherto correct and humdrum existence. Alas for angels' visits! From a bench in Our Square, nurse saw the aerial messenger and traced the string to the Varick roof. She hurried home and upstairs to the roof-top a good twenty minutes before her scheduled return.

But the scuttle stuck, and Carlo's quick ear, catching the sound, warned him. With a quick word to his playfellow, he dodged behind the chimney and began to climb the looped rope. There was a little space in which the climber always emerged above the chimney into the view of the child in the cage before he surmounted the coping of the upper roof. Paula's eyes were fixed upon this point. The nurse's glance followed hers. Carlo appeared, climbing in hot haste. He missed one of the loops. There was a muffled cry. His body turned, swayed, and plunged down into the fifty-foot abyss between the two buildings. The nurse, scared out of her senses, rushed down the scuttle-way and hid in her room, accusing herself of being an involuntary murderess, while poor Paula tore and battered with her tender fingers at the cruel iron meshes in a passion of grief and despair, long after nurse had disappeared.

A low call from above stopped her. Her angel leaned over the roof.

“Has she gone?” he asked.

The child nodded in silent terror and wonder. He came down the rope swiftly and steadily. When he approached the cage, she saw that he was bleeding from a gash above his temple.

“I struck on a clothesline,” he said. “It tipped me into a balcony. Just below your roof. Lucky!”

“I thought you were killed,” she whispered. “Oh, Angel, I thought you were dead.”

“Not hurt a bit,” he averred valiantly. “Did she see me?”

“Yes.”

“Then they won't let me come any more.”

“They'll take me away,” wailed the Tiger.

There was a pause. “I'll be sorry,” said the boy.

“So'll I.”

“I'll be aw'f'ly sorry,” said the boy painfully.

“So'll I.”

“I'll come and find you when I'm grown up.”

“Will you?” she cried eagerly.

“Cross my heart.”

“And I'll keep your gum forevern—evern—ever,” she promised solemnly. “I've got a piece yet. Hidden. Listen. Somebody's coming!”

“Good-bye, Tiger,” said the boy.

“Good-bye, Angel,” said the girl.

She put her trembling little lips against the cold mesh of the wires. For a moment he hesitated in boyish shamefacedness. Then he bent over to her.

“I'll never forget you—never,” said the free little boy.

“Nor I,” said the caged little girl.

He ran and climbed: climbed out of her sight and out of her life. For the scandalized Varicks took her from that desecrated roof to the country, and when they came back Carlo's father was dead, and Carlo left with very little visible means of support. So they passed on their sundered ways. He went about his business of the fight for existence and his place in the world. She went about her business in a life of developing sunshine and beauty, herself the developing embodiment of both. The cage stood on the roof, lifeless, grim, and sad.

Outwardly Our Square changes little. Inwardly it suffers from the depredations of the years and an encroaching populace. No more significant evidence of its failing fortunes could be adduced than the sale of the Varick mansion. It was purchased by a Swedish labor contractor, who sold it to a professional gambler, who in turn leased it to a boarding-house keeper, and that sinister third-floor front wherefrom Ver-nam Varick had so vehemently ousted his Satanic mentor came to be occupied (to what base uses!) by a piano-tuner. The cage of the wistful Tiger was found convenient for the week's wash.

As for the Varicks, Our Square knew them no more. The fussy, fubsy, mean-tempered father of Paula became financially venturous (for a Varick), dipped extensively into water-rights and power-plants in the Southwest, and, having thus further improved the fortune handed down to him by Vernam the Devil-Chaser, built himself a smugly splendid palace on the Park, wherein to house Paula.

This, indeed, was no cage. For the tiny captive of the housetop had grown beyond all human captivity; had become such a woman as the great dreamers and poets enshrine in the sunlit mist of verse. It is not for a simple, old pedagogue who had loved the child to describe the woman. Her face is the common property of the public, like a ruling monarch's, so often has it appeared in the Sunday papers, for at twenty-three she was one of the reigning beauties of a city of lovely women. What no camera could catch or painter fix was the joyous and joy-giving quality of her personality. It was as if arrears of happiness from her cramped and denied childhood had returned upon her tenfold to be scattered in largess wherever she went. A great painter who had painted a great portrait of her, which delighted every one but himself, had convicted himself of failure because, he said, while he had caught the flowerlike delicacy and the sunlike radiance and the touch of Varick imperiousness in the background of the face, he had failed to fix the charm that made her different and more lovely than a dozen other equally lovely women (he was a dealer in paradox, that great painter); the look of quiet, unconscious, waiting deep in the wide, gray eyes. And a great poet, who was also of her adorers, said that was why she had not married. And a great cynic whose cynicism had fallen before her said that was why she never would marry unless a star came down from the heavens to claim her.

About the time of the height of her triumphs, Cyrus the Gaunt came to Our Square to run the ten thousand-pound steam roller at night and sit for sculpture by day, and eventually marry the Bonnie Lassie and go to live in the little, quaint, old friendly house with the hospitable door, almost opposite the Varick mansion. Because Cyrus the Gaunt's forbears had owned Our Square when it was the Staten Farm and before the first Varick had arrived upon the scene, Mr. Putnam Varick was willing enough that his daughter should go to see Mr. and Mrs. Cyrus Staten, albeit he had heard with misgivings that some of their dinners were laxly Bohemian, combining, as they did, millionaires, bishops, and diplomats with musicians, explorers, reformers, and other anarchists. That is how Paula Varick came back into Our Square after fifteen years of absence and change.

Another revenant came back about that time, along the dimly blazed trails of fate. As I was sunning myself on my favorite bench, one afternoon, I felt two sinewy hands on my shoulders, and turned to face a big, smiling stranger. There was something in him that told at first sight of the making of the man; told that the best life of the open had formed him and the best life of the cities had finished him. There was a certain gravity and stability about his face, but the lips were mobile as a boy's and a shining mirthfulness gleamed from the straight-looking black eyes.

“Dominie!” he said. Then, at my astonished look: “I haven't made a mistake, have I?”

“Not in the title at least,” I said.

He shook me in his iron grip. “Call on your memory. It's ungrateful to forget a man who—who owes you money,” he laughed.

“That doesn't help me,” I said, probing the vivid face.

“Have I changed so, where nothing else has changed?” he said, looking around—“except that they've put a fire escape outside the window where I used to sleep.” I followed his glance, and memory flashed its belated recognition: “Carlo Trentano!” He gave me another powerful, affectionate shake. It was like being petted by a lion. “No longer,” he said. “That's buried with—with him.” He looked again toward the high-roofed house where his father had died. “I'm all American now, Charles Trent, at your service.”

“Where have I heard that name?”

“Seen it in the papers probably. They've had their fun with me in the Senate Committee hearings.”

“Ah! So you're the Trent who's been making all the trouble for the water-power people in the Southwest! And I thought that wonderful boy's imagination of yours was going to make a poet of you, or at least a dramatist.”

“It made me see visions,” he explained with gravity—“visions that had to be expressed in facts. After I had worked my way through college, I went out to the desert country. And I saw visions of water brought from the mountains. What I saw I made other people see. Now there are growing cities and fertile farms where there used to be only dry sand and my imagination. Isn't that poetry, dominie,—and drama?”

It was all said quite simply, and without brag, as a man would explain the working of some power outside of himself.

“But where did you get the money?”

“People brought it to me. The people of the dry country first. Afterward it came in from all over, much of it from New York; and when I needed more for my biggest projects I went to Europe and raised it.”

“You know what they say of you now? That you're advocating government control because you've got all you can get, and wish to shut out the others.”

“I'm offering to put my companies on the same terms with the others,” he said impatiently. “All I demand is that eventually, when the development concerns have made their fair profit, the rights should revert to the people. So I'm an anarchist,” he laughed. “And I've come here to preach my anarchy in the face of Wall Street.”

“And fifteen years ago you were a boy of—”

“Sh-h-h-h,” he warned with mock seriousness. “I pass for thirty-five. It's a studied solemnity of demeanor that does the trick. You should see me at a board meeting! This is holiday.” He seized and hugged me until my old ribs cracked.

“Yet you say you're all American,” I protested, extricating myself. “You'll be a Latin till the day you die.”

“Not enough to impair my business sense. Which reminds me. You've got a small, accumulated interest in one of my early projects. It isn't much,—just the debt for my lessons,—but it pays a twenty-five per cent dividend. Now, dominie, I don't wish to hear any protests. What do you know about business matters?” He stretched himself like a big, lithe animal and took another comprehensive glance about Our Square. “Who's left?” he asked. “Any one I knew?”

“MacLachan the Tailor. And Thomsen of the Élite Restaurant. Calder the artist is dead. And do you remember—” I cut myself short, on second thought, of mentioning Paula Varick. A better idea had come to me. The Bonnie Lassie loves and loves forever the friend who will bring to her house any one genuinely new and interesting, provided only that he be presentable. Carlo, otherwise Charles Trent, was all three in an eminent degree. “Would you care to dine at the pleasantest house in Our Square?” I amended.

“If I have the time.”

“Make the time,” I advised. “And I'll see if I can make the place. It'll be Wednesday evening.” For the Bonnie Lassie was giving one of her little dinners then, and I knew that Paula Varick was to be there.

Carlo agreed, gave me his address at a golden caravansary, and left to call on MacLachan and Thomsen. I sought out the Bonnie Lassie.

“Madam,” said I, “I am not coming to your dinner.”

“You are,” she retorted. “Paula Varick will be there. You'd crawl to San Francisco to see Paula.”

“That's the very reason. I've got a substitute.” And I explained.

The Bonnie Lassie, who is an inveterate romanticist, was delighted. “I'll have him take her in,” she said. “No, I can't do that. The new Ambassador to Spain is to take her in. He shall sit on her left.”

“When you present him, introduce her as Miss Mumbleplum or something inarticulate and non-committal of that sort. She won't know his name, of course. Let's see if they'll discover.”

“And you accuse me of fixing up dramatic situations,” said the Bonnie Lassie scornfully, for she has never quite forgiven my comments upon her management of the affair between Ethel Bennington and the Little Red Doctor, which was so nearly ruined by the hard, prosaic fact of a toothache. “You're worse than an old maid. But you may come to the dinner just the same. I don't mind an extra man.”

So I went to the dinner, and a very wonderful dinner it was, as all the dinners in the Bonnie Lassie's house are. Mr. Charles Trent was very much present, looking typically American with his severely correct clothes, and big, graceful figure, until you noticed his eyes, which weren't American at all, or anything else but individual. Miss Paula Varick was also very much present, looking—well, looking as only Paula can look, to the utter wreck and ruin of the peace of mankind's mind. In presenting Carlo to Miss Mumbleplum (as pre-arranged) the hostess gave them a lead by saying:—

“Mr. Trent can tell you all about your water-rights. He's a sort of magic lord of the dry desert.”

“A baron of sand and cactus,” said Trent, smiling. But the new Ambassador to Spain arrived just then, and nothing more was said.

At the first opportunity afforded by the diplomat, Miss Varick turned to the guest on her left.

“I'm a landed proprietor in your country,” she said. “I own ten whole shares of stock in a company of some sort.”

“Then you're my fellow citizen,” he claimed. “Perhaps it's one of the companies I'm interested in.”

She named it, and he was amused to learn that her little ownership was in the corporation which was fighting him and his plans most savagely. She did not mention that her father was a principal stockholder and an officer in that same corporation. Nor did Trent deem it necessary to define his position. He didn't wish to talk politics to this wonderful flower-woman next him. But he did wish, most determinedly, to keep those luminous eyes turned in his direction. What Charles Trent determinedly wished he usually got, and he achieved this particular end by talking so well that the fresh-bloomed diplomat on the farther side began presently to get fretful. As for Mr. Trent's right side, it mattered not a whit whether it knew what his left side was doing, for it was on his right that I sat. Carlo fell to telling Paula of the romance of the hunt for the treasure of water in a dry land—more thrilling to a pioneer of imagination than any search for gold or silver or copper because it meant something more basic than wealth: it meant life in a country which was dead. There were searches for lost canons and unmapped rivers; explorations of wild gorges where the adventurers in improvised boats shot down along thou-sand-foot-deep cracks in the earth toward unknown rapids, listening for the thunder of possible cataracts; and, out of all this rude peril, the growth of vast projects and the gathering in from far cities of dollars, pounds, francs, marks, and even roubles, that a desert land might flower and new cities arise.

“What about your own hairbreadth 'scapes in the imminent, deadly thingumbob—I never can remember the whole of a quotation?” she inquired. “You're very modest about your own share. Tell me the narrowest escape you ever had.”

He answered, thoughtfully: “Curiously enough, I fancy the narrowest escape I ever had was less than a block from here. I fell down between two houses.”

The girl's eyes widened suddenly. “On Our Square?”

“Yes. Except for the prosaic matter of the week's wash on a clothesline which shunted me off, I probably shouldn't be here to-day.”

“Mr. Trent,” said she slowly, “do you mind turning around this way? Farther. Thank you. Is that scar over your temple—”

“Yes. I got it there. How could you know?”

Then recognition flashed between them. They laughed excitedly, like two children. To the scandal of the bewildered Ambassador's ears, they then entered upon the following incredible conversation:—

“Little Boy, where did you come from?”

“Up there.”

“From that cloud?” (The diplomat looking at the ceiling with pained amazement.)

“Yes.”

“Let—me—see,” said the girl dreamily. “What comes next? We mustn't lose it.”

“Do you like gum?” he supplied quickly. (The ambassadorial eyes began to protrude.)

“What's gum?”

“Chewing-gum, of course. But alas! I haven't any with me,” lamented Carlo. “Then there was something about a tiger.

“Oh, yes! I'm a tiger in my cage. Gr-rr-rr-rr! If I could get out I'd eat you up, Little Boy.”

“Of course!

“Say some more. You couldn't remember it, though, could you? Can you remember it now?”

He leaned over to her the merest trifle:—

he quoted (slightly altering the text for his own purposes) with a look so direct and an intonation so profound that Paula, with all her armored experience, felt herself growing pink.

“Then you brought me wonderful things to play with and a kite to fly and gum to chew,” she said.

“And you put it in your hair.”

“So I did. And they found it. But I didn't tell. I said an angel brought it to me. You remember? You were Angel.”

“And you were Tiger.”

Now, I realize that diplomats of ambassadorial degree do not snort. But the eminent gentleman on Miss Varick's left delivered his emotions of what, in a lesser mortal, would have been dangerously near a snort, and thenceforward devoted his attention to his hostess exclusively, thereby seriously hampering her in her efforts to follow the progress of the reunion of old playmates.

Dinner being over, the Bonnie Lassie took the pair into her studio to see her new series of unfinished bronzes, and, having got them there, obeyed an imperative (and purely imaginary) summons from without, and left them. Quite unwisely—for she had forgotten one important incident herself—the Tiger reproached the Angel with his failure to remember her.

“You promised,” she accused. “You said you'd never forget—never.”

Now, a less ready wit than Carlo's might have retorted with the “ettu” argument, which would have been poor strategy. Carlo did better.

“I have forgotten nothing,” he said calmly.

“You forgot me. You didn't know me from—from any other tiger.”

“There never was any other tiger. There couldn't be. Also, I remember every episode of our last meeting when I promised never to forget. Do you?” Something significant in his tone caused the Tiger certain misgivings. She began to feel dimly that her accusation was unfortunate.

“Do you?” persisted the Angel.

“I remember the dreadful feeling of seeing you disappear, down into that hole. And your coming back with the blood trickling down your cheek. You were very brave.”

“And our parting. Do you remember? When you came close to the wire mesh, and lifted your face—Ah, I see you do remember,” he concluded quietly.

For suddenly the blood had flown into Paula Varick's face, and she stood there, amazed, confused, thrilling with an alarm new to her womanhood, and wholly glorious. In a moment she had recovered her poise.

“I remember that I had a true and loyal friend,” she said sweetly. “Have I still?” He bent and lifted her finger-tips to his lips. “For as long as you will command him,” he said.

So it was assumed, without definite arrangement, that on his return from Washington they were to see each other, and so far had their thoughts wandered from the distant Southwestern desert that neither conceived the smallest misgivings as to the conflicting interests there of the Trent projects and the Varick interests. In the course of a day or two the Bonnie Lassie had the pair to tea, and afterward she and Cyrus the Gaunt and I stood at the front window, watching them as they crossed Our Square. They paused to look up at the cage on the housetop. The Bonnie Lassie spoke.

“You remember Tarrant, the portrait-painter, bewailing himself over Paula?” she asked.

“Because he couldn't catch the look of unconscious waiting in her eyes?”

“Yes. It's gone,” said the Bonnie Lassie.

“Is there something else in its place?”

“Wonder,” said the Bonnie Lassie.

As for Carlo, there was no mistaking what had happened to him. He came to see me later, and tried hard not to talk of Paula Varick, but all the time his eyes kept wandering to the cage on the roof. Once he asked me whether I thought the Varick mansion could be bought. As for his affairs in Washington, I think he must have commuted while the Senate hearings were in progress, for there were few days when he wasn't in New York. By what devices he succeeded in being around Our Square when his playmate of other days came down to see the Bonnie Lassie, I do not know. Probably the Bonnie Lassie was in the conspiracy. It would be like her. All of which may have been going on for a fortnight when I stopped in at the quaint, little, nestly, old-fashioned house which radiates the happiness of Cyrus the Gaunt and the Bonnie Lassie all through Our Square and beyond, and found the sculptress hard at work in her studio. My particular purpose was to consult her about Orpheus the Greek and his pipings to his lost Eurydice. Before I could begin the Bonnie Lassie removed her finger from the eye of old Granny Glynn (in wet clay) and pointed it at me.

“Plotter!” she said.

By that I knew that something had gone wrong. “Tell me the worst,” I besought.

“You did it,” she accused, still holding me up at the point of that pink and leveled digit.

“Guilty!” I pleaded. “What did I do, when, how, and to whom?”

“You brought those two ex-infants together. And now look at the poor things!”

“Are they engaged?” I cried, in high hope.

“Engaged! Have you seen the morning papers?”

She waved a modeling tool at a heap of print in the corner and relieved her feelings by giving Granny Glynn a vicious whack on the nose with the implement. I caught up the top paper and read:—

“Oh, that's only politics,” I said, with an attempt at easiness.

“Putnam Varick himself turned Mr. Trent out of the house when he went to see Paula,” said the Bonnie Lassie, a bright spot of color burning in each soft cheek. “Is that politics?”

“That,” said I, “is war. What is Paula going to do about it?”

“What can she do?”

“Meet him outside, I suppose.”

“Do you think Paula Varick is the kind of girl to practice hole-and-corner meetings at museums or restaurants?” said the sculptress scornfully.

“There are other places. Here, for instance. Though I suppose you wouldn't allow that.”

This reasonable hypothesis nearly cost old Mrs. Glynn an ear. “Indeed I would! I'd do anything to get ahead of that father of Paula's. The mean old skinkum!” said the Bonnie Lassie, who under great provocation sometimes uses violent language. “But Paula wouldn't come. It's the Varick pride—all that there is of Varick in her, thank Heaven!”

“It has its disadvantages,” I said. “But the point is, does she care for him?”

“Have you seen them together lately? But then, what's the use! You're only a man,” said the Bonnie Lassie with sovereign contempt. For the moment she ceased to be an artist and became a philosopher. “Some people,” she pronounced sagely, “just naturally fall in love by degrees. Some”—her face turned unconsciously toward the outer room where Cyrus the Gaunt was busy, and became dreamy and tender—“run away from love and are overtaken by it. And some go open-hearted and open-armed, to meet it when it comes. That is Paula. She's the type of woman to whom there is only one possible man in the world. He has found her.”

“Does she know it?”

The Bonnie Lassie, smiling, poised her tool above a difficult problem of artistry pertaining to Granny Glynn's front hair (which was false). “You're less stupid than you might be. Her heart does. But her mind hasn't admitted it.”

“Does he know it?”

“No. He hardly dares hope. He's so terribly afraid.”

“It's the first time in his life, then.”

“I believe you, dominie. Perhaps it's the first time he's been in love, too. It's good for his soul, but it's hard on the poor man. When he came this morning for a sitting he looked more like a pale martyr in a stained-glass window than a flesh-and-blood man. I had to send him away.”

“Oh, well,” I said comfortably, “if they really care for each other, time will straighten it out.”

“It will,” she retorted. “About three days' time. The Varicks start for the Far East on Saturday.”

“Without Paula's seeing Carlo again?” I asked in dismay.

“Mr. Varick has written a note to Mr. Trent saying that it is by Paula's own wish, and that she does not want to see him again.”

“That's a lie, isn't it?” I asked.

“Probably it is. But I don't think Paula will see him. If she has promised her father, she certainly won't. Now, what are you going to do about it?” she concluded calmly, laying down her implement and fixing me with an accusing eye.

“What am I—”

“Don't try to evade your responsibility, dominie. It's all your doing.”

“Just because it isn't turning out right,” I said hotly. “You know perfectly well, lassie, that if everything had gone smoothly you would have—”

“Claimed all the credit.” The Bonnie Lassie, dimpling, took the words out of my mouth. “And quite right too. When I manage things they're—they're managed. Once again I ask you, dominie: What are you going to do about it?”

I walked over to the window and looked out, leaning on my cane. Against a pale corner of the sky, the cage top loomed haggard and grim. A swift and soaring notion sprang into being in my mind.

“I'm going to borrow your telephone,” said I.

Getting Miss Paula Varick was no slight task. I had to run the gauntlet of half a dozen questioners—they were guarding her against the onslaught of the predatory Trent, I suppose—before she answered me, not in the softly ringing music of her familiar voice, but with a deadened tonelessness which both startled and reassured me. When I had delivered my message, I returned to the studio.

“Well?” queried the Bonnie Lassie.

“I have just talked with Paula.”

“What did she say?”

“She said, as nearly as I recall, 'Oh!' Also, 'Thank you, dominie!'”

“Don't be a horrid and exasperating old man. What did you say to her?”

“I gave her some interesting news about a local landmark.”

The Bonnie Lassie came over to me in three swift little bounds like a kitten, and pointed some sort of high-art tool at my chin. “Tell me at once,” she commanded.

“I've just informed Miss Varick that the cage on the roof of No. 13 has been ordered removed not later than tomorrow.”

“Has it?”

“Thinking,” I pursued serenely, “that she might wish to take a final look at the place where she first tasted the delights of chewing-gum,—these crucial experiences of childhood, you know—”

“Don't be a goose, dominie. Suppose she doesn't come?”

“Then you were wrong, and she doesn't really care for him.”

The Bonnie Lassie lowered her tool and bestowed a glance of approval upon me which encouraged me to continue.

“She might even want to go up to the housetop once more.”

“She might,” agreed the Bonnie Lassie thoughtfully. “That could be arranged—in case she does.”

“A little judicious stimulus to her mind,” I suggested, “if it doesn't occur to her.”

“Leave it to me.”

One of the many delightful things about the Bonnie Lassie is that it's never necessary to draw diagrams for her. So I left it to her and went to telephone Carlo. He said that he had a business engagement or two for the following morning, but it didn't matter (in a voice which indicated that nothing in the world mattered any more), and if I wished to see him of course he'd come.

So I bade the Bonnie Lassie good-day and went home to mature a reasonable excuse for summoning one of the busiest young men in America to my side. By the time he arrived the next day I had a plausible sort of lie fixed up about a stock concerning which I wished some advice. Schepstein, our local financier, had coached me on it. But when Carlo inquired at the start whether it was common or preferred I was talking about, I had to admit that I didn't know.

“What did you send for me for, then, dominie?” he asked patiently.

A motor-car which I recognized had arrived at and departed from the Bonnie Lassie's door. I played desperately for time, while Carlo's disconsolate regard wandered to the wire-mesh structure, seen only dimly now through the half-bare branches of trees which had been small when he was a boy and my pupil. From where he sat he could not see—I maneuvered his seat to manage that—what I saw; two girlish figures cross Our Square and separate at the entrance to No. 13. The Bonnie Lassie had done her part. Now for mine.

“Carlo,” I said, “are you looking at the Tiger's cage?”

“Yes.”

“They're tearing it down to-day or to-morrow.”

“Are they?” said he vaguely, and lost himself in a sad maze.

I reflected with bitterness that sentiment in the man and sentiment in the woman often assume different manifestations.

“I was in your garret last week,” I continued. “It isn't much changed.”

“What is it being used for?”

“A sort of loft. The wall panel your father sketched in crayon is still there.”

“I'd like to see that,” said Carlo.

“Nothing easier,” I replied with elation. “I know the people. Come along.” Five minutes later we were climbing the stairs to the top floor. Carlo sought out the blurred sketch and stood before it. “Poor old padre,” he mused. “He believed that he was destined to become a great painter. I wonder.”

His glance roamed. “There's where I used to sleep when the nights were hot. And there's my study corner. You were good to me, dominie. What's the matter? Aren't you well?”

“It's close here,” I said with desperate strategy, and pushed open the dormer half-door leading to the roof.

Carlo's face, which had grown dreamy, suddenly became overspread with gloom as he looked out upon the roof. He hesitated. And the precious moments were passing. Paula must be on her former roof at that moment. Any minute she might leave. Would Carlo go out for a look, or—He went out. I followed. A high, inspiring wind was blowing. It hummed and cried through the meshes of the cage on the roof below with the voice of a thousand imperative and untranslatable messages. The girl in the cage held her face toward it, yearning to its dim and pregnant music, and I thought I had never seen a face so lovely, so lonely, so desolate. Then I turned to Carlo and was glad to the root-nerves of my heart that I had brought him.

That gladness lasted about one heartbeat and died a death of terror. For, without a word, Carlo stepped upon the coping, lowered himself over the grim well-space between the houses, then threw his body outward, with a swift, powerful impulsion. He hurtled down the ten feet, which might be fifty, and destruction, if his out-thrust were not forceful enough. But he landed, one hundred and ninety-odd pounds of hard, lithe manhood, on the edge of the roof, as light and firm as a cat. At the sound she turned and saw him coming to her from behind the chimney, as he had come in the days of her lonely childhood.

“Little Tiger,” he said very softly.

“Angel!” She tried bravely to laugh, but it was an uncertain, fluttering sound. “Have you dropped from your cloud again?”

He came straight to the cage door and stood, looking at her with his soul in his eyes, and she strove to meet his gaze, her own look fluttering away before the sweet terror of full realization.

Carlo set his hand to the latch. Some unknown imbecile, solicitous for the safety of the week's wash, had put some sort of an infernal patent spring lock upon the door. It resisted. His hand fell.

“Will you open it to me?” he said quietly.

“I—I can't,” said the girl.

“Is it to be the old barrier, then?” he said passionately—“the barrier that has always been set between us?”

She made no reply. But there came to her face a wonderful color, and to her lips a wonderful smile.

“Paula,” said Carlo, “nothing can stand between us except your will.” He raised both hands to the heavy meshes. “Shall I come?”

“Come!” she said.

Then that gate sprang from its hinges with a shriek of tortured metal, the voice, as it might be, of all the generations of Varicks, raised in frenzied, ineffectual protest. Oh, yes, I suppose the sockets were rusted out and ready to give way; nevertheless, it was a startling and thrilling thing to see. He tossed the door behind him, where it fell with a harsh rattle. And Paula, uncaged at last, came to his heart with a cry, and clung there.

Age warms itself in reflected fires. I was sitting on my favorite bench in Our Square some weeks later, meditating with a mild glow upon the outcome of the encounter between Carlo and his Tiger (for which, by the way, the Bonnie Lassie put in a wholly unjustified claim of half-credit), when two figures walking quite close together approached and stopped in front of me. They were very good to look at, those two, as youth and joy and the splendor of love are always good for old age to look at. I welcomed them to a corner of my bench, facing the Varick mansion, which was poor policy.

“So you haven't gone to the Far East?” I said to Miss Paula.

“No,” she said, “father decided not to take me. He has gone for his health.”

“Nothing serious, I trust,” I said politely.

“He is Suffering,” said Miss Paula primly, “from unrequited objections.” Her smiling and happy regard rested on Carlo and then passed dreamily to the squat and broad and drab old mansion facing us.

“Why!” she cried, “the cage is still there!”

“So it is,” I answered as nonchalantly as I could.

“Then they didn't tear it down.”

“Apparently they didn't.”

“You told me they were going to. And you told Ang—Carlo they were going to.”

“Did I? So I did. They must have changed their minds.”

“Who ordered it down?” inquired Carlo mildly.

“The fire department,” I said promptly. “On account of the inflammable nature of steel wire, I suppose.”

“I mean the sanitary inspectors,” I hastily corrected myself.

“For fear that somebody might sleep in it and catch cold! Of course!”

“Well, the fact is—”

“The fact is,” said Miss Paula Varick, “that you're a wicked old, scheming old, blessed old fibber.”

And she then and there pounced upon me and kissed me under the left ear, in the full and astounded sight of Our Square. Carlo's hand covered hers as it rested on my shoulder, and we three lifted our faces again to the cage, standing unchanged on the housetop, gaunt and grim and lifeless. As we looked, the sun, striking through the edges of a cloud,—such as angels descend from,—touched the harsh, dull metal to flaming crimson and glowing gold, and made of it a living glory, as love makes a living glory of life.