's hut, a wretched place
of a single story, with a shuttered window and a thatched roof full of
holes and overgrown with weeds. As they approached the door a mighty
clatter was audible within, and Mrs. Jenny held the boy's hand in a
tightened grasp, fearful of devilry. As they stood irresolute to
advance or retreat, a big cat dashed out at the doorway with a feline
imprecation, and the wizard appeared, revengefully waving a stick, and
swearing furiously.

'Cuss the brute,' he said, 'the divil's in her, sure an' sartin'.'

It seemed not unlikely to the onlookers, the cat being the wizard's
property, and therefore, by all rule and prescription, his prompter and
familiar. She was not of the received colour, however, her fur being
of a rusty red. But as she raised her back, and spat at her master's
visitors from under her chubbed tail, she looked demoniac enough for
anything. And from the fashion in which, her anathema once launched, she
sat down and betook herself to the rearrangement of her ruffled coat, it
might have been conjectured that it was not purely personal to them, but
that they were attacked merely as types of the human race, whose society
she and her master had forsworn.

'Cuss her!' reiterated the wizard. 'Where's her got tew? My soul, what's
this?'

He peered with a short-sighted terror-stricken scowl on Mrs. Jenny
and her charge, as if for a moment the fancy had crossed him that his
refractory familiar had taken their shapes. His gray lips muttered
something, and his fingers worked oddly as he took a step or two
forward, clearly outlined in the cold winter sunshine against the black
void beyond his open door.

'Why, Rufus, what's the matter?' asked Mrs. Jenny. 'Don't look like that
at a body.'

'It's you, mum?' said the necromancer. A look of relief came into his
wizened face. 'I didn't know but what it might be----' His voice trailed
off into an indistinct murmur, and he smeared his hand heavily across
his face, and looked at it, mistrustfully, as if he rather expected to
find something else in its place. 'Cuss her!' he said again, looking
round for the cat.

'What's she done?' demanded Mrs. Jenny.

'Done? Ate up all my brekfus, that's what she's done,' rejoined
the wizard. The familiar grinned with a relish of the situation so
fiendishly human that Dick clung closer to Mrs. Rusker's hand, and
devoutly wished himself back in the trap. To his childish sense the
incongruity of one gifted with demo