“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?”