Our Square

I

OUR Square lies broad and green and busy, in the forgotten depths of the great city. By day it is bright with the laughter of children and shrill with the bickering of neighbors. By night the voice of the spellbinder is strident on its corners, but from the remoter benches float murmurs where the young couples sit, and sighs where the old folk relax their weariness. New York knows little of Our Square, submerged as we are in a circle of slums. Yet for us, as for more Elysian fields, the crocus springs in the happy grass, the flash and song of the birds stir our trees, and Romance fans us with the wind of its imperishable wing.

The first robin was singing in our one lone lilac when the Bonnie Lassie came out of the Somewhere Else into Our Square and possessed herself of the ground floor of our smallest house, the nestly little dwelling with the quaint old door and the broad, friendly vestibule, next but one to the Greek church. Before she had been there a month she had established eminent domain over all of us. Even MacLachan, the dour tailor on the corner, used to burst into song when she passed. It was he who dubbed her the Bonnie Lassie, and as it was the first decent word he’d spoken of living being within the memory of Our Square, the name stuck. Apart from that, it was eminently appropriate. She was a small girl who might have been perhaps twenty-three or twenty-four if she hadn’t (more probably) been twenty, and looked a good deal like a thoughtful kitten when she wasn’t twinkling at or with somebody. When she twinkled—and she did it with eyes, voice, heart, and soul all at once—the cart-peddlers stopped business to look and listen. You can’t go further than that, not in Our Square at least.

How long Cyrus the Gaunt had been there before she discovered him is a matter of conjecture. He slipped in from the Outer Darkness quite unobtrusively and sat about looking thoughtful and lonely. He was exaggeratedly long and loose and mussed-up and melancholy-looking, and first attracted local attention on a bench which several other people wanted more than he did. So he got up and gave it to them. Later, when the huskiest of them met him and explained, by way of putting him in his proper place, what would have happened to him if he hadn’t been so obliging, Cyrus absent-mindedly said, “Oh, yes,” threw the belligerent one into our fountain, held him under water quite as long as was safe, dragged him out, hauled him over to Schwartz’s, and bought him a drink. Thereafter Cyrus was still considered an outlander, but nobody actively objected to his sitting around Our Square, looking as melancholy and queer as he chose. Nobody, that is, until the Bonnie Lassie took him in hand.

Nothing could have been more correct than their first meeting, sanctioned as it was by the majesty of the law. Terry the Cop, who presides over the destinies of Our Square, led the Bonnie Lassie to Cyrus’s bench and said; “Miss, this is the young feller you asked me about. Make you two acquainted.”

Thereupon the young man got up and said, “How-d’ye-do?” wonderingly, and the young woman nodded and said, “How-d’ye-do?” non-committally, and the young policeman strolled away, serene in the consciousness of a social duty well performed.

The Bonnie Lassie regarded her new acquaintance with soft, studious eyes. There was something discomfortingly dehumanizing in that intent appraisal. He wriggled.

“Yes, I think you’ll do,” she ruminated slowly.

“Thanks,” murmured Cyrus, wondering for what.

“Suppose we sit down and talk it over,” said she.

Studying her unobtrusively from his characteristically drooping position, Cyrus wondered what this half-fairy, half-flower, with the decisive manner of a mistress of destiny, was doing in so grubby an environment.

On her part, she reflected that she had seldom encountered so homely a face, and speculated as to whether that was its sole claim to interest. Then he lifted his head; his eyes met hers, and she modified her estimate, substituting for “homely,” first “queer,” then “quaint,” and finally “unusual.” Also there was something impersonally but hauntingly reminiscent about him; something baffling and disconcerting, too. The face wasn’t right.

“Do you mind answering some questions?” she asked.

“Depends,” he replied guardedly. “Well, I’ll try. Do you live here?”

“Just around the corner.”

“What do you do?”

“Nothing much.”

“How long have you been doing it?”

“Too long.”

“Why don’t you stop?”

For the second time Cyrus the Gaunt lifted his long, thin face and looked her in the eye. “Beautiful Incognita,” he drawled with mild impertinence, “did you write the Shorter Catechism or are you merely plagiarizing?”

“Oh!” she said. Surprise and the slightest touch of dismay were in the monosyllable. “I’m afraid I’ve made a mistake. I thought—the policeman said you were a down-and-outer.”

“I’m the First Honorary Vice-President of the Life Branch of the Organization.”

He slumped back into his former attitude. Again she studied him. “No, I don’t understand,” she said slowly.

But the dehumanizing tone had gone from the soft voice. Cyrus began to rescue his personality from her impersonal ignoring of it. He also felt suddenly a livelier interest in life. Then, unexpectedly, she turned his flank.

“You lurk and stare at my house in the dark,” she accused.

“Which house?” he asked, startled.

“You know quite well. You shouldn’t stare at strange houses. It embarrasses them.”

“Is that the miniature mansion with the little bronzes of dancing street-children in the windows?”

She nodded.

“Why shouldn’t I stare? There’s a secret in that house!”

“A secret? What secret?”

“The secret of happiness. Those dancing kiddies have got it. I want it. I want to know what makes’em so happy.”

“I do,” said the girl promptly.

“Yes. I shouldn’t be surprised,” he assented, lifting his head to contemplate her with his direct and grave regard. “Do you live there with them?”

“They’re mine. I model them. I’m a sculptor.”

“Good Lord! You! But you’re a very good one, aren’t you?—if you did those.”

“I’ve been a very bad one. Now I’m trying to be a very good one.”

A gleam of comprehension lit his eye. “Oh, then it’s as a subject that you thought I’d do. You wanted to sculp me.”

“Yes, I do. For my collection. You see, I’ve adopted this Square.”

“And now you’re sculping it. I see.” He raised himself to peer across at the windows where the blithe figures danced, tiny m�nads of the gutter, Bacch� of the asphalt. “But I don’t see why on earth you want me. Do you think you could make me happy?”

“I shouldn’t try.”

“Hopeless job, you think? As a sculptor you ought to be a better judge of character. You ought to pierce through the externals and perceive with your artistic eye that beneath this austere mask I’m as merry a little cricket as ever had his chirp smothered by the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune.”

It was then that she twinkled at him, and the twinkle grew into a laugh, such golden laughter as brightened life to the limits of its farthest echo. Cyrus had the feeling that the gray April sky had momentarily opened up and sent down a sun-ray to illumine the proceedings.

“How wonderfully you mix them!” she cried. “Shall I sculp you in cap and bells?”

“Why should I let you sculp meat all?” She stopped laughing abruptly and looked up at him with wondering eyes and parted lips, drooping just the tiniest bit at the corners. “Everybody does,” she said.

At once he understood why everybody did that or anything else she wished. “All right,” he yielded. “What am I to sit for?”

“Fifty cents an hour.”

Then the Bonnie Lassie got her second surprise from him. His face changed abruptly. An almost animal eagerness shone in his eyes. “Fif-fif-fif—” he began, then recovered himself. “Pardon my performing like a deranged steam-whistle, but do I understand that you offer to pay me for sitting about doing nothing while you work? Did all those cheerful dancers in the window collect pay at that rate?”

“Some of them did. Others are my friends.”

“Ah, you draw social distinctions, I perceive.”

“I think we needn’t fence,” said the girl spiritedly. “When I came to you I thought you were of Our Square. If you will tell me just what variety of masquerader you are, we shall get on faster.”

“Do you think I don’t belong quite as much to Our Square as you do?”

“Oh, I! This is my workshop. This is my life. But you—I should have suspected you from the first word you spoke. What are you? Don’t tell me that you are here Settlementing or Sociologizing or Improving the Condition of Somebody Else! Because I really do need your face,” she concluded with convincing earnestness. “It’s yours at fifty cents an hour.”

“And you’re not an Improver?”

“Absolutely not. Do I look as if I’d improved myself?”

“You wouldn’t do at all for my present purpose, improved,” she observed. “Please don’t forget that. When can you come to me?”

“Any time.”

“Haven’t you anything else to do?”

“Nothing but look out for odd jobs. That’s why I’m so grateful for regular employment.”

“But this isn’t regular employment.” His face fell. “It’s most irregular, and there’s very little of it.”

“Oh, well, it’s fifty cents an hour. And that’s more than I’ve ever earned in my life, Miss Sculptor.”

“I am Miss Willard.”.

“Then, Miss Willard, you’re employing Cyrus Murphy. Do you think I’ll sculp up like a Murphy?”

“I don’t think you’ll sculp up like a Murphy at all, and I’ve too many friends who are Murphys to believe that you are one. In fact, I could do you much better if I knew what you are.”

“That’s quite simple. I’m a suicide. I walked right spang over the edge of life and disappeared. Splash! Bubble-bubble! There goes nothing. The only difference between me and a real suicide is that I have to eat. At times it’s difficult.”

“Haven’t you any trade? Can’t you do anything?” With a sweep of her little hand she indicated the bustling activities with which the outer streets whirred. “Isn’t there any place for you in all this?”

He contemplated the world’s work as exemplified around Our Square. His gaze came to rest upon a steam-roller, ponderously clanking over a railed-off portion of the street. “I suppose I could run that.”

“Could you? That’s a man’s job at least. Have you ever run one?”

“No, but I know I could. Any kind of machinery just eats out of my hand.”

“Well, that’s something. It’s better than being a model. Be at my house tomorrow at nine please.”

For an hour thereafter Cyrus the Gaunt sat on the bench musing upon a small, flower-like, almost absurdly efficient young person who had contracted, as he viewed it, to inject light and color into life at fifty cents an hour, and who had plainly intimated that, in her view, he was not a man. It was that precise opinion expressed by another and a very unlike person which was responsible for his being where he was. At that time it had made him furious. Now it made him thoughtful.

Presently he went through his pockets, reckoned his assets, rose up from the bench, and made a trip to MacLachan’s “Home of Fashion,” where he left his clothes to be pressed overnight. In the morning he reappeared again, shaved to the closest limit of human endurance, and thus addressed the Scot:—

“Have you got my clothes pressed?”

“Aye,” said the tailor.

“Well, unpress ‘em again.”

“Eh?” said the tailor.

“Unpress’em. Sit on’em. Roll’em on the floor. Muss’em up. Put all the wrinkles back, just as they were.”

“Mon, ye shud leave the whiskey be,” advised the tailor.

Thereupon Cyrus caught up his neatly creased suit and proceeded to play football with it, after which he put it on and viewed himself with satisfaction.

“And I almost forgot that she wouldn’t have any use for me, improved,” he muttered as he wended his way to the little, old friendly house. “Lord, I might have lost my job!”

Any expectation of social diversion at fifty cents an hour which Cyrus the Gaunt may have cherished was promptly quashed on his arrival. It was a very businesslike little sculptor who took him in hand.

“Sit here, please—the right knee farther forward—let the chin drop a little—” and all that sort of thing.

He might not even watch the soft, strong little hands as they patted and kneaded, nor the vivid face as plastic as the material from which the hands worked their wonders, for when he attempted it:—

“I don’t wish you to look at me. I wish you to look at nothing, as you do when you sit on the bench. Make your eyes tired again.”

The difficulty was that his eyes, tired so long with that weariness which lies at the very roots of being, didn’t feel tired at all in the little studio. For one thing, there was an absurd, fluffed-up whirlwind of a kitten who performed miracles of obstacle-racing all over the place. Then, in the most unexpected crannies and corners lurked tiny bronzes, instinct with life: a wistful dog submitting an injured paw to a boy hardly as large as himself; “Androcles” this one was labeled. Then there was “Mystery,” a young, ill-clad girl, looking down at a dead butterfly; “Remnants,” a withered and bent old woman, staggering under her load of builders’ refuse; “The Knight,” a small boy astride across the body of his drunken father, brandishing a cudgel against a circle of unseen tormentors; and many others, all vivid with that feeling for the human struggle which alone can make metal live.

“Recess!” cried the worker presently. “You’re doing quite well!”

Thus encouraged, Cyrus ventured a question:—

“Where are the dancers?”

“They’re all in the window.”

“But this in here is quite as big work, isn’t it? Why isn’t some of it on display?”

“It’s for outsiders. It isn’t for my people.” She put a world of protectiveness in the two final words.

“I can’t see why not.”

“Because the people of Our Square don’t need to be told of the tragedy of life. Joy and play and laughter is what they need. So I give it to them.”

A light came into his tired, old-young eyes. “Do you know, I begin to think you’re a very wonderful person.”

“Time to work again,” said she. Whereby, being an understanding young man, he perceived that there would be no safe divergence from the strict relations of employer and employed, for the present at least. Half a dozen times he sat for her, sometimes collecting a dollar, sometimes only fifty cents, the money being invariably handed over with a demure and determined air of business procedure, and duly entered in a tiny book, which was a never-failing source of suppressed amusement to him. Then one day the basis abruptly changed, for a reason he did not learn about until long after.

It had to do with a process which I must regretfully term eavesdropping, on the part of the little sculptor. The subjects were two-on-a-bench, in Our Square. One was Cyrus the Gaunt; the other an inconsiderable and hopeless lounger, grim and wan.

Silver passed between them, and something else, less tangible, something which lighted a sudden flame of hope in the hopeless face.

“A real job?” the lurking sculptor overheard him say, hoarsely.

Cyrus nodded. “Nine o’clock to-morrow morning, here,” said he.

Slipping quietly away, the girl almost ran into the grim and wan lounger, no longer so grim and several degrees less wan, as he rounded the opposite curve of the circle and passed out on the street in front of her. The next instant Cyrus shot by her at a long-legged gallop and caught the man by the shoulder.

“Here! Wait! Not nine o’clock,” he cried breathlessly. “I forgot. I’ve got an engagement, a—very important business engagement.”

The other’s jaw dropped. “What the—” he began, when there appeared before them both a trim and twinkling vision of femininity.

“I’m glad I saw you,” said the vision to Cyrus, “because I shan’t want you until ten-thirty to-morrow.” Then she passed on, so deep in thought that she hardly responded to the greetings which accosted her on all sides. “I don’t understand it at all” she murmured.

Promptly upon the morrow’s hour Cyrus appeared at the studio, rumpled and mussed as usual. “How do you do?” the artist greeted him. “Before we go to work I want you to meet Fluff.”

Cyrus glanced at the kitten, who was chasing a phantom mouse up the swaying curtain. “I already know Fluff,” said he.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” she corrected gently. “That is, Fluff doesn’t know you. She doesn’t know that you are alive. Fluff is a person of fine distinctions. Come here, Mischief.” The kitten gave over the chase, after one last lightning swipe, and trotted across the room. “Fluff,” said her mistress, “this is our friend, Cyrus.” The kitten purred and nosed Cyrus’s foot.

“Thank you,” said the young man gratefully. “I also am not wholly insensible to fine distinctions. Fluff, do you know how those ancient barbarian parties looked and acted when they were called ‘friend of the state of Rome’? Well, regard me.”

His employer twinkled at him with her eyes. “I’ve sold you,” she remarked.

“At a good price?”

“Yes. You were really very good.”

“It would have been kind to let me see myself before you bartered me away into eternal captivity.”

“Kinder not.”

“You mean I shouldn’t have liked your idea of me?”

“Didn’t I say that it was good?” she returned with composed pride. “My idea of you wouldn’t be good, as modeling. This is the real you, the man underneath.”

“That’s worse. You think I oughtn’t to like myself as I am.”

She looked up at him with intimate and sympathetic friendliness. “Well, do you?” was all she said.

“Whether I do or not, it’s pretty evident what you think of me.”

“It ought to be. I’ve introduced you to Fluff. One can’t be too careful as to whom one introduces to one’s young and guileless daughter.”

“Thank you.” For the first time in their acquaintance he smiled. The smile changed his face luminously.

She tossed the tiny iron with which she was working into the far corner of the studio. “That settles it,” she said. “I’m through.”

“For the day?”

“Wrong! All wrong!” she cried vehemently, disregarding his question. “Why did you have to go and smile that way? I haven’t done you at all. Do you know what I’ve been sculping you as?”

“You wouldn’t tell me, you know. Nothing very flattering, I judged.”

“As a disenchanted and uncontrolled drifter.”

“And now you think perhaps I’m not?”

“I don’t know what you are, but I think I might as well be clicking the shutter of a camera, for all I’ve done with you. The point is, that I’ve come to the end of you for the present.”

“You don’t want me any more?” he cried, aghast.

“If I did, you wouldn’t have time. I’ve got you a real man’s job.”

“What kind of slavery have you sold me into this time?”

“The steam-roller. I’ve used my influence—you don’t know what a pull I’ve got around here—and I can name my man for the late night-shift. Will you take it?” His face was elate. “Will I take it! Will a duck eat pie?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. Will it?”

“It will if it can’t get anything else to eat. How long is this job good for?”

“All summer and more. How long are you?”

“Till released.”

“You have made a promise. I’ll enter it in my ledger.” Which she did, writing it down in her absurd little booklet with a delicious solemnity of importance.

“But can’t I come and sit for you afternoons?” he pleaded.

“How many wages do you want to earn? No; not at present. But Miss Fluff and I are at home to honest working friends on Friday evenings. Come here, Miss Fluff, and tell the new engineer that we’ll be glad to have him come and tell us about the job when he’s learned it.” But the kitten paid no heed, being at that moment engaged in treacherously and scientifically stalking an imaginary butterfly along the window-sill.

“Before I’m banished,” said Cyrus, “may I ask a question?”

“You might try it.”

“Do you mind telling me your given name? Not for use,” he added, as she looked up at him with her grave, speculative gaze, “but just as a guaranty of good faith. I set great store by other people’s names, having been cursed since birth with my own Persian abomination.”

“I don’t think Cyrus is bad at all,” she said. “Mine is Carol.”

“Oh,” said he blankly.

“Don’t you like it?”

“It’s a very nice name, for some people,” he said guardedly.

“You don’t like it. Why?”

There was no evading the directness of that demand. “I never knew but one girl named Carol,” he said. “She squinted.”

“What of it? I don’t squint. Do I? Do I? DO I?”

With each repetition of her defiance she took one step nearer him, until at the last she was fairly standing on tiptoe under his nose. Cyrus the Gaunt looked down into those radiant eyes that grew wider and deeper and deeper and wider, until his heart, which had been slipping perilously of late, fell into them and was hopelessly lost. “Do I?” she demanded once more.

Cyrus responded with a loud yell. Inappropriate as the outcry was, it saved a situation becoming potentially dangerous, for not far below those luminous eyes was a dimple that flickered at the corner of a challenging mouth; unconsciously challenging, doubtless, yet—And then Fluff, opportunely descrying her imaginary butterfly on the side of Cyrus’s trouser-leg, made a flying leap and drove ten keen claws through the fabric into the skin beneath. Her mistress dislodged the too ardent entomologist, and apologized demurely.

“You see,” said she, “you’ve become an intimate of the household. When you’re too busy to come and see us, Fluff and I will peek out and admire you as you go plunging past on your irresistible course.”

“It’s going to be a lonely job,” said Cyrus the Gaunt wistfully, “compared to this one.”

“Nonsense!” she retorted briskly as she handed him a dollar bill. “Here’s your pay. You’ll be too busy to be lonely. Good luck, Mr. Engineer.”

II

Thus Cyrus the Gaunt became a toiler in, and by slow degrees a citizen of, Our Square. We are a doubtful people where strangers are concerned. The ritual of initiation for Cyrus was, at first, chance words and offhand nods, then an occasional bidding to sit in at Schwartz’s, and finally consultations and confidences on matters of import, political, social, or private. Thus was Cyrus the Gaunt adopted as one of us. Quite from the outset of his job he became a notable pictorial asset of the place, standing out, lank and black, in the intermittent gleam of his own engine, as he rolled on his appointed course amidst firmamental thunderings. Acting as chauffeur to ten tons of ill-balanced metal, he promptly discovered, is an occupation to which the tyro must pay explicit heed if he would keep within the bounds of his precinct. About the time when he was beginning to feel at ease with his charger, he came to a stop, one misty night, directly opposite the window of a taxicab, and met a pair of eyes which straightway became fixed in a paralysis of amazed doubt.

“No; it isn’t. It can’t be,” said the owner of the eyes presently.

“Yes, it is,” contradicted Cyrus.

“Well, I’m jiggered!”

“That’s all that the pious young Presbyterian boss of a fashionable church has a right to be.”

“What are you doing up there?”

“Piloting a submarine under Governor’s Island.”

“So I see.” The taxi-door opened, and some six feet of well-tailored manhood mounted nimbly to Cyrus’s side. “What’s the fare? And why? Is it a bet?”

Cyrus the Gaunt grinned amiably in the face of the Reverend Morris Cartwright, whose appearance in that quarter did not greatly surprise him. “How did you know? It’s leaked out at the club, has it?”

“Not that I know of. I guessed it.”

“Thought nothing short of a bet would account for such a reversal of form, eh? Keep it to yourself, and I’ll tell you the rest.”

“You’ve hired an ear,” observed the young cleric.

“Maybe you heard that I had a nervous breakdown last spring. Kind of a mixture of things.”

“Yes; I know the mixture. Three of gin to one of Italian.”

“You know too much for a minister,” growled the other. “Besides, it was only part that. I just sort of got sick of doing nothing and being nothing, and the sickness struck in, I expect. Well, one morning, after a night of bridge, I came out into the breakfast-room nine hundred plus to the good, and about ready to invest the whole in any kind of painless dope that would save me from being bored with this life any more. There sat Doc Gerritt, pink and smooth like a cherry-stone clam. I stuck out my hand, and it was shaking. I dare say my voice was shaking, too, for Gerry looked up pretty sharp, when I said, ‘Doc, can you do anything for me?’ ‘No,’ says he. ‘Is it as bad as that?’ I asked. ‘It’s worse,’ says he. ‘I’m a busy man with no time to waste on sure losses. Flat down, Cyrus, you aren’t worth it.’ ‘This is all I’ve got of me,’ I said. ‘I’m worth it to myself.’ ‘Then do it for yourself,’ he snapped. ‘You’re the only one that can.’ ‘Will you tell me how?’ ‘I will,’ says he. ‘But you won’t do it. You aren’t man enough.’ ‘Gerry,’ I said, ‘you may be a good doctor, but you’re a damn liar.’ ‘Am I?’ says he. ‘Prove it. Cut the booze and go to work.’ 'Work won’t do me any good,’ I said. ‘I’ve tried it, and it bored me worse than the other thing. When I’m bored, I naturally reach for a drink.’ (There’s a great truth in that, you know, Carty, if the temperance people would only grab it: boredom and booze —cause and effect.) ‘That’s a hot line of advice, Doc,’ I said. ‘Maybe you’ll think better of it when you get my bill for fifty,’ says he. (I got it, too. I’ve still got it.) 'I don’t mean Wall Street, Cyrus,’ says he. ‘I mean work. You’ve never tried work. You’ve just played at it. I’ll bet you a thousand,’ he went on (he was playing me up to this all the time, Carty), ‘that you’d starve in six months if you tried to make your living where nobody knows you.’ Well, Carty, you know how I am with a bet. It comes just as natural to me to say 'You’re on,’ as ‘Here’s how,’ or ‘Have another.’ I said it, and here I am. I’ll bet Doc Gerritt’s laughing yet,” he concluded with a wry face.

“They say he’s the best diagnostician going, in his own line.” The young clergyman studied Cyrus out of the corner of his eye. “I wouldn’t wonder if it were true. How do you like the prescription so far?”

“Interesting,” said Cyrus the Gaunt. “I’ve been hungry, and I’ve been lonely, and I’ve been scared, and I’ve even been near-yellow, but I haven’t been bored for a minute. You never get bored, Carty, when you have the probabilities of your next meal to speculate on, pro and con. Odd jobs have been my stay mostly, before I landed this. And when there wasn’t anything in my own line, I kept up my nerve by catching ‘em on the way down and shoving ‘em into jobs on Jink Hereford’s Canadian preserve.”

“Good man!” approved the Reverend Morris Cartwright. “What’ll you have?” he added.

“Frankfurters and a glass of milk, if it’s an open order. But you’ll have to fetch it to me from Schwartz’s. I can’t leave this here skittish little pet of mine.”

Then and there some Sunday supplement missed a “throbbing human-interest story” in that no reporter was present to witness one of New York’s fashionable young pastors emerging from an obscure saloon bearing food and drink to the grimy driver of an all-night thunder-wagon.

“And now,” said Cyrus the Gaunt, handing down the empty glass, “if it isn’t one of your disgraceful secrets, what are you doing in this galley? Heading off some poor unfortunate who wants to go to the devil peacefully, in his own way?”

“No, I leave that to the doctors,” retorted the other mildly.

“Quite so,” chuckled Cyrus. “Throw some water in my face and drag me to my corner, will you?”

“This is an errand of diplomacy,” continued Cartwright. “I’m an envoy. Do you happen to know which house—” His ranging vision fell upon the row of figures joyously dancing in the window. “Never mind,” he said, “I’ve found it.” He disappeared between the portals of the old-fashioned, hospitable door.

Quite a considerable part of his week’s wages would Cyrus the Gaunt have forfeited to interpret the visitor’s expression when he came out, a long hour later. He looked at once harassed, regretful, and yet triumphant, as one might look who had achieved the object of a thankless errand.

The Bonnie Lassie came to the door with him and stood gazing out across the flaring lights and quivering shadows of Our Square. It seemed to Cyrus that the flower-face drooped a little.

And indeed the Bonnie Lassie was not feeling very happy. When one’s adopted world goes well, the claims that draw one back become irksome ties. The messenger from the world which she had temporarily foregone was far from welcome. But at least she had claimed and won some months of respite and freedom for her work.

So engrossed did she become with that work that she saw little or nothing of Cyrus the Gaunt until Chance brought them together in the climatic fashion so dear to that Protean arbiter of destinies. Returning one evening from a call upon a small invalid friend in a tenement quite remote from Our Square, the Bonnie Lassie essayed a cross-cut which skirted the mouth of a blind alley. From within there sounded a woman’s scream of pain and fear.

The Bonnie Lassie hesitated. It was a forbidding alley, and the scream was not inspiriting. It was repeated. Not for nothing is one undisputed empress of Our Square. The Bonnie Lassie had the courage of one who rules. She swooped into that black byway like a swallow entering a cave. Now the screams were muffled, with a grisly, choked sound. They led her flying feet toward a narrow side passage. But before she reached the turn, a towering bulk sped by her, almost filling the thin slit between the walls.

When she came within view, the matter was apparently settled. A swarthy, vividly clad woman cringed against one wall. Against the other Cyrus had pinned a swarthier man. The man, helpless, seemed to be wheedling and promising. With a final shake and a growl—the girl likened it in her mind to that of a great, magnanimous dog—the gaunt one released the Sicilian and stopped to pick up his hat, which had fallen in the struggle. Then the girl’s heart leaped and clogged her throat with terror, for, as Cyrus turned, the pretense fell from the face of his opponent and it changed to a mask of murder. His hand darted to his breast and came forth clutching the thin, terrible, homemade stiletto of the rag-picking tribe, a file ground to a rounded needle-point. The girl strove to cry out. It seemed to her only the whisper of a nightmare. But it was enough.

Cyrus spun around and leaped back. His arm went out stiff as a bar. At the end of it was a formidable something which flashed with an ugly glint of metal in the Sicilian’s face. Whether or not she heard a report, the terror-stricken onlooker could not have said. But the would-be murderer screamed, tottered, withered. His weapon tinkled upon the coping. Then an arm of inordinate size and strength encircled the Bonnie Lassie, whirled her up out of a pit of blackness, and supported her through a reeling world. At her ear a quietly urgent voice kept insisting that she must walk—walk—walk, and not let herself lapse. A shock jolted her brain. It was the smell of ammonia. The darkness dissipated, became an almost intolerable light, and she found herself seated opposite Cyrus the Gaunt at a polished metal table in an ice cream parlor.

“Don’t let go of my hand,” she whispered faintly.

His big, reassuring clasp tightened. “We got away before the crowd came,” he said. “You have wonderful nerve. I thought you were gone.”

“Don’t speak of it,” she shuddered. “I can’t stand it.”

Not until, after a slow, silent walk, they were seated on a bench in Our Square could she gather her resolution for the dreadful question. “Did you kill him?”

“Good Lord, no!”

Whirled her up out of a pit of blackness, and supported her through a reeling world.

“But—but—you shot him!”

“Yes, with this.” He thrust his hand in his pocket, and again, as she closed her eyes against the sight, she caught faintly the pungent stimulus that had revived her.

“What is it?”

“Ammonia-pop. Model of my own.” Her eyes flew open, the color flooded into her cheeks, but receded again. “He might have killed you!” she exclaimed. “I thought when you turned away and I saw the dagger that— Oh, how could you take such a desperate chance?”

“Just fool-in-the-head, I guess. I supposed he was through. Don’t know that breed, you see. But for you, he’d have got me.”

“But for you,” she retorted, “I don’t know what might have happened to me. How came you to be down in that slum?”

“Oh,” said he carelessly, “I prowl.”

“As far away as that?” She looked at him, sidelong.

“All around. I know that neighborhood like a book.”

“What’s the name of that alley?”

“Alley? Er—what alley?”

“Mr. Cyrus Murphy, how long have you been following me about?”

He turned an unpicturesque, dull red. “Well, that’s no place for a girl alone,” he growled.

“You know, one evening I thought I saw you, down near Avenue C, but I couldn’t be sure. Was it?”

“It might have been,” he grudged. “Avenue C is a public thoroughfare.”

“And you’ve been guarding me,” she murmured.

Her eyes brooded on him, and the color was rising in her face to match his. But, while Cyrus blushed like a brick, the Bonnie Lassie blushed like the hue of flying clouds after sunset.

“Why don’t you take a policeman?” he blurted out. “If anything should happen to you—It isn’t safe,” he concluded lamely.

“Not even when I’m chaperoned with an ammonia popgun?” she smiled. “Why do you carry that?”

“For dogs. Dogs don’t always like me. It’s my clothes, I suppose.”

“Any dog who wouldn’t like and trust you on sight,” she pronounced with intense conviction, “is an imbecile.”

He smiled his acknowledgment. At that her face altered.

“There you go, smiling once more,” she said fretfully. “You do it very seldom, but—”

“I’m always smiling, deep inside me, at you,” he said quietly.

“But when you smile outside, it makes you so different. And I find I’ve done you all wrong.”

“Are you still sculping me?” he asked in surprise.

“I—I have been, but I stopped.” She paused, trying again to think of him as merely a model, and found, to her discomfiture, that it caused a queer, inexplicable little pang deep inside her heart. Nevertheless, the artist rose overpoweringly within her at his next question.

“Do you want me to sit for you again?”

“Oh, would you? Now?”

He glanced at the church clock. “I’ve forty-seven minutes,” he said.

Much may be accomplished in forty-seven minutes. In the studio she sprang to her work with a sort of contained fury. And as the eager, intent eyes regarded him with an ever-increasing impersonality, a pain was born in his heart and grew and burned, because to this woman who had clung to him in the abandonment of mortal weakness but an hour before, whose pulses had leaped and fluttered for his peril, he had become only a subject for exploitation, something to further her talent, wax to her deft hand.

Perhaps he had been that since the first. Well, what right had he to expect anything more?

Nothing of this reached the absorbed worker. She was intent upon her model’s mouth and chin, whereon she had caught the sense of significant changes. Had she but once come forth from her absorption to see and interpret the man’s eyes, she might have known. For only in the eyes does a brave man’s suffering show; the rest of his face he may control beyond betrayal. Something happily restrained her from offering payment as usual, when she finally threw the cloth over the unfinished sketch.

“You spoke of dogs not liking your clothes,” she said lightly. “Do you always sleep in them?”

“Oh, no. They sleep on the floor at the foot of my bed and keep watch. May I have them pressed?”

“It would be an interesting change. But why ask my permission?”

“Because you told me once to come as is.’”

“So I did,” she laughed. “But that was before you were an honest workingman. Go and get pressed out.”

“No more use for me as a model?”

“Oh, I don’t say that.”

“But I’m to see you sometimes?” he persisted.

“How could it be otherwise, with you doing patrol duty in front of my door?” she twinkled.

With unnecessary emphasis she shut the door upon the retiring form of Cyrus the Gaunt. But his double, already inalienable, returned to the studio with her and formed a severely accusative third party to her dual self-communion. Said the woman within her, woefully: “I mustn’t see him again. I mustn’t! I mustn’t!” Said the sculptor within her, exultingly: “I’ve got him. I’ve got what I wanted. It’s there and I’ve fixed it forever.” Which was a mistake of the sculptor’s, however nearly right or wrong the woman may have been.

Thenceforward, it appeared to Cyrus the Gaunt, the Bonnie Lassie exhibited an increasing tendency toward invisibility. When he did see her, there were sure to be other people about, and she seemed subdued and distrait. Presently the suspicion dawned upon Cyrus that she was avoiding him. Being a simple, direct person, he laid his theory before her. She denied it with unnecessary heat; but that didn’t go far toward rehabilitating the old cheerful and friendly status. Cyrus the Gaunt, despite a wage which assured three excellent meals per day, began to grow gaunter. Our Square commented upon it with concern.

There came a time when, for ten consecutive days, Cyrus the Gaunt never set eyes upon the Bonnie Lassie, nor did his ear so much as catch a single lilt of her laughter. At the end of that period, strolling moodily past his now flavorless job full two hours early, he beheld mounting the steps of the funny little mansion a heavy male figure, clad from head to foot in what had a grisly suggestion of professional black. The sight sent a chill to Cyrus’s heart. The chill froze solid when on a nearer approach to the house he heard the sound of voices within, joined in a slow chant. Half-blind and shaking, he made his way to the rail and clung there. Slowly the words took form and meaning, and this was their solemn message:—

The Good Man,
When-he-falleth-in-Love
And-getteth-Snubbed,
Breaketh Forth In-to Tears:
But-the-Ungawdly Careth Notta Damn!
For Woman,
She-is-but-Vanity
Ay, Verily, and False-Curls.
And-the-Wooing Thereof Is Bitterness.
For-he-Wasteth-his-Substance-Upon-Her,
Taking-her-Pic-nics and Balls.
And she Danceth with some
Other Feller.
Oh-hh SLUSH!!!

A window-shade floated sideways, revealing to the peerer’s gaze a gnome with blue ears beating out the tempo with the fire-tongs for a quartette, consisting of an aeroplane, a Salvation Army captain, a white rabbit, and an Apache, while a motley crowd circulated around them. In the intensity of his relief, Cyrus the Gaunt took a great resolve: “Invited or not invited, I’m going to that party.”

MacLachan’s “Home of Fashion” on the corner was long since dark, but Cyrus’s pedal fantasia on the panels brought forth the indignant proprietor.

“What have you got for me to go to a fancy party in, Mac?” demanded his disturber.

“Turnverein or Pansy Social Circle?” inquired the practical tailor.

“Neither. A dead swell party.”

“Go as ye are-rr, ye fule!” said the Scot, and slammed the door.

“Perfectly simple,” said Cyrus the Gaunt. “I’ll do it.”

He hastened around to Schwartz’s to wash his hands and smut his face artistically.

III

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 Soir�e 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 f�te 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 D�rer 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 r�le 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.

IV

Winter comes, stern and sharp, like an unpaid landlord, to Our Square, with sleet and gale for its agents of eviction. No longer are the benches blithe with the voice of love or play or gossip. The wind has blown them all away. A few tenacious leaves still cling, withered, brown, and clattering, to the trees, “bare, ruin’d choirs where late’ the sweet birds sang,” and a few hardy stragglers beat across the unprotected spaces, just to maintain, as it were, the human right of way against the gray rigor of the skies. But, for the most part, we of Our Square, going about our concerns, huddle as close as may be to the lee of walls, for—though we would not for the world have it known—many of us are none too warmly clad. Behind the blank opaqueness of the bordering windows one may surmise much want and penury and cold, which, also, we keep to ourselves. Our Square has its pride. We do not publish our trials.

Perhaps Cyrus the Gaunt knew as much of them as any. For, by imperceptible gradations, he had become the ‘confidant, the judge, the arbiter of our difficulties, and the friend of the shyest, the hardest, and the proudest of us alike. His engine-seat was become a throne, from whence he dispensed every good thing but charity. That word and all that follows in its train he hated. Which shows that he had learned Our Square. After hours he would “drop in,” almost secretly, on some friend; and it was a curious coincidence that Cyrus’s friends were chosen apparently on the basis of need and distress. He had that rare knack of helping out without involving the aided one in the coils of obligation. There is nothing Our Square wouldn’t have done for Cyrus the Gaunt. I believe he could even have been elected alderman.

Winter drove Cyrus from his perch and put a brake on the thunder-wagon before the job was quite finished. There still remained some final repairs which must now wait for the spring, on the side where the Bonnie Lassie’s little house stood, bleak and desolate. Not wholly deserted, however, for one brave and happy dancer still stuck to her post in the window, lifting a thrilled face to the sky. Other employment claimed Cyrus the Gaunt until his iron steed should come out of the stable; a day job on a stationary engine around in Pike Street. Our Square remarked with concern that the indoor employment didn’t seem to suit Cyrus the Gaunt. He became gaunter and thinner and more melancholy-looking, and more than once he was seen on wild nights, when nobody was supposed to be out late, staring at the now quite unembarrassed house with the quaint little door and the broad vestibule. But though the light and cheer that Our Square had seen grow in Cyrus’s face in the early days of his job, were graying over, there increased the new understanding and sympathy and determination, in lines that he had put there himself in the building of his new manhood. Thus, only, in this perplexing world, does a man lift himself by his own boot-straps.

Though Cyrus the Gaunt could boast a thousand friends, he had accepted but one intimate. That was MacLachan the tailor. Every day they lunched on frankfurters and kohlrabi at Schwartz’s. Thither Cyrus was wont to have his scanty mail sent from the house where he lodged. One blustery December day the tailor arrived late, to find his friend fingering a pink slip of paper, of suggestive appearance.

“Ye’ll have been aimin’ a bit ootside!” commented MacLachan.

Cyrus flipped the paper over to him.

“Save us!” cried the awe-stricken Scot. “It’s a thousan’ dollars. All in the one piece!”

“Two months overdue. He didn’t have my address, I suppose.”

“Ha’e ye been drawin’ a lottery?”

“No. It’s a bet. Also my release. I’d almost forgotten. My time’s up.”

“Ye’ll not be leavin’ us?” said the tailor. Cyrus avoided his eyes. “I’m through, Mac,” he said dully. “It’s no use. It’s not worth while. Nothing’s worth while.” There was a long pause. “Mon,” said MacLachan finally, “ha’e ye tho’t what this’ll mean to Our Square?”

Cyrus the Gaunt thought. Behind the curtain of his impenetrable face there passed a panorama of recent memories; events which had, for the first time in his career, made him one with the fabric of life. Faces appealed to him; hands were outstretched to him confidently for the friendly help that he could give so well; the voices of the children hailed him as a fellow; the baseball team which did most of its practice at noon on the asphalt claimed a corner of his memory; his ears rang with the everyday greetings of his own people, and another panorama, summoned up by the pink slip, faded away. Cyrus folded the check and put it carefully in the pocket of his overalls.

“Ye’ll be stayin’ here,” said MacLachan contentedly, having read his expression.

Cyrus nodded. Then the tailor’s dour-ness fell from him for the moment. He laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Laddie,” he said, “the little bronze dancer is in the window yet.”

Cyrus turned a haggard face to him. “I know,” he said.

“Do ye make nothin’ o’ that?”

“Nothing. You know why—what she went away for.”

“I ha’e haird.”

“Well, I’m learning to forget.”

“The little bronze dancer is in the window yet,” repeated the obstinate Scot.

How Cyrus won through that long winter is his own affair. Our Square respects other people’s troubles. It asked no questions. Finally winter broke and fled before a southeast wind full of fragrance, and the trees began to whisper important tidings to each other; and a pioneer butterfly of the deepest, most luminous purple-black, with buff edges to its wings, arrived and led the whole juvenile populace such a chase as surely never was since the Pied Piper fluted his seductions long ago; and the benches came out of their long retreat, fresh-painted, to stand sturdy and stiff in their old places; and so did Cyrus’s thun-der-wagon, whereon he perched nightly once more, and was even more than before the taciturn, humorous, kindly, secret, friendly adviser to all and sundry.

Then, one crisp March evening he became aware of a strong, bent, feminine figure beckoning him from the curbstone. Clanging to a halt, he heard a voice, unforgettable through its tinge of foreign accent, say: —

“How do you do? I have been seeing your face all through my travels.” Cyrus took off his working-cap and shook hands. “So I have come back to look at it. It’s thin. Would you like to be painted?”

“I don’t think so, thank you. I’ve been sculped within an inch of my life.”

“So I have understood,” said the Very Great Woman with a smile not devoid of sympathy. “You are not done with it yet. She is coming.”

The face of Cyrus the Gaunt lighted marvelously.. “Coming back to Our Square?” he cried. Then the light faded. “But—”

“But me no buts. She is coming. I did it. I found that she had never finished you. So I told her that if she did not come back and finish, I would take you away from her and finish you myself. And, oh, I am as bad a sculptor as I am a good painter—-almost!” Her laughter rang in the chill air. “So she comes. And I have traveled all the way to this impossible spot to play traitor. The question is: Are you a man? You look it, at last!”

“The question is—Will you answer me one?”

“No! No! No! No! No! Put your questions where they belong. Farewell, my Pha�thon of the Slums.”

The world was mad with the wine of the wind the night the Bonnie Lassie came back to Our Square. All our trees waved their lean arms in welcome and sent down little buds as messengers of joy over her return. Of living welcomers there was none, for the gale had swept all humans before it, except Terry the Cop, and he didn’t recognize her, from the distance, in her other-worldly raiment. That must have cost her a pang. Unnoticed she crept into the little, old, quaint, friendly house, and its doors closed behind her like the reassurance of a friendly arm. She set herself in the dark window where the blithe dancer still tripped it, faithful and lonely, and waited for Cyrus the Gaunt. But when she saw his face, the Bonnie Lassie didn’t sculp. She cried.

Cyrus mounted to his seat and pulled the lever over. The engine was running badly that night, and the wind almost blew him from his perch. Aside from the improbability that the little sculptor would brave such weather, the charioteer was presently so immersed in his own immediate concerns that he all but forgot the prospective visit. When he had brought his charge to its senses and reduced it to some control, he was interrupted by the plight of a belated push-cart woman, who was dragging anchor and drifting fast to leeward under the furious impulsion of the nor’easter. Cyrus had just dragged her almost from under his ponderous wheels, when a beam flashed in his eyes, and he looked up to see a truck close upon them. His yell split the darkness. The truck-driver, with a mighty wrench, swung his vehicle sharp to the left, and up on the sidewalk.

The uptilted lights shone full into the lower window of the little, old, friendly house. Pressed against that window Cyrus saw the apparition of a tear-softened, desolate visage. Reason, prudence, and propriety deserted their posts in his brain simultaneously. A dozen long-legged leaps carried him as far as the vestibule of the little house. There his knees basely weakened. Perhaps her heart divined his step and sent her forth to meet him; or perhaps it was his old ally, Chance, that brought her into the vestibule as he stood there shaking.

“Oh!” she cried, and shrank back into a corner, with a deprecatory movement, which to him was infinitely pathetic.

“I’m sorry,” said Cyrus. “I saw your face and thought you were in trouble. If—if you wanted me to sit for you again,” he said composedly, “I should be very glad to, until you’ve finished your sketch.”

“Oh, no. I couldn’t ask you. I couldn’t think of—after—what—what—” Her voice waned into silence.

“Don’t feel that way at all,” he encouraged her with resolved cheerfulness. “I can be a model and nothing more, again, I assure you.”

Her upturned eyes implored him. “Don’t be cruel,” she said.

“Cruel?” he repeated wonderingly.

“Not at all. I’ll be polite. It isn’t too late to offer my best wishes. Though I’m not sure I know the name.”

“What name?”

“Your—your married name.”

“Then you don’t know?” she gasped. The brain of Cyrus the Gaunt suddenly went numb. “I know you went away from us to get married.”

“I did,” she quavered. “But I couldn’t. I—I—I tried to make myself go through with it. I couldn’t. No woman could when—when—” Her voice trembled into silence.

A boisterous back-draft of the tempest thrust its way through the door and puffed out the little vestibule light. With a sense of irreparable loss impending he felt, rather than heard, her moving from him into the blackness of the outer world. Yet his mind seemed clogged and chained as he strove to grasp the meaning of what she had said—or was it what she had left unsaid?

And in a moment she would be gone forever.

Suddenly—miracle of miracles!—he felt those soft, strong hands on his arm, and heard her sobbing appeal: “Oh, Cyrus! Aren’t you ever going to smile at me inside again?”

His arms went out. The Bonnie Lassie’s hands slipped up to his shoulder. The flower-face pressed, close and cold and sweet, against his.

“Love of my heart!” he cried, “I’ll never do anything else all my life long.”

Summer is tyrant in Our Square now. The leaves droop, flaccid and dusty, on the trees, and the sun gives a shrewish welcome to the faithful who still cling to the benches. Gone is Cyrus’s chariot of flame and thunder. The work is done. Gone, too, is Cyrus, and with him the Bonnie Lassie, after a wedding duly set forth with much pomp and splendor in the public prints. Among those present was Our Square.

So now the little, quaint, old, friendly house stands vacant, with eager sunbeams darting about it in search of entry. Vacant but not cheerless, for behind the panes, against which the Bonnie Lassie once pressed her sorrowful face, troop the elfin company of her dream-children, the dancing figurines. Cyrus the Gaunt would have it so. He deeded her the house as a wedding-gift, that the happy dancers might remain with us lonely and unforgetting folk. They are the promise that one day Our Bonnie Lassie will come back to Our Square.