a
friendly soul, and until Joseph's arrival she had had to depend for
company mainly on the footsteps of the man in the flat across the way.
Moreover, the building was an old one, and it creaked at night. There
was a loose board in the passage which made burglar noises in the dark
behind you when you stepped on it on the way to bed; and there were
funny scratching sounds which made you jump and hold your breath.
Joseph soon put a stop to all that. With Joseph around, a loose board
became a loose board, nothing more, and a scratching noise just a plain
scratching noise.

And then one afternoon he disappeared.

Having searched the flat without finding him, Elizabeth went to the
window, with the intention of making a bird's-eye survey of the street.
She was not hopeful, for she had just come from the street, and there
had been no sign of him then.

Outside the window was a broad ledge, running the width of the
building. It terminated on the left, in a shallow balcony belonging to
the flat whose front door faced hers--the flat of the young man whose
footsteps she sometimes heard. She knew he was a young man, because
Francis had told her so. His name, James Renshaw Boyd, she had learned
from the same source.

On this shallow balcony, licking his fur with the tip of a crimson
tongue and generally behaving as if he were in his own backyard, sat
Joseph.

'Jo-seph!' cried Elizabeth--surprise, joy, and reproach combining to
give her voice an almost melodramatic quiver.

He looked at her coldly. Worse, he looked at her as if she had been an
utter stranger. Bulging with her meat and drink, he cut her dead; and,
having done so, turned and walked into the next flat.

Elizabeth was a girl of spirit. Joseph might look at her as if she were
a saucerful of tainted milk, but he was her cat, and she meant to get
him back. She went out and rang the bell of Mr James Renshaw Boyd's
flat.

The door was opened by a shirt-sleeved young man. He was by no means an
unsightly young man. Indeed, of his type--the rough-haired,
clean-shaven, square-jawed type--he was a distinctly good-looking young
man. Even though she was regarding him at the moment purely in the
light of a machine for returning strayed cats, Elizabeth noticed that.

She smiled upon him. It was not the fault of this nice-looking young
man that his sitting-room window was open; or that Joseph was an
ungrateful little beast who should have no fish that night.

'Would you m