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.