trust. Possibly the cat knew even the profession of him who
came that way so softly and alone in the still afternoon. Anyway, he
acted as if he did.

Like a snake, and with rather less noise, Pharaoh slid off the sofa and
to the door leading into the scullery. For a moment he stopped,
looking back over his shoulder, one paw uplifted, body drooping on bent
legs, inscrutable, fierce eyes staring. Then he was gone.

I don't know how he went. He just seemed to fade out in the frame of
the doorway and into the shadowed coolth of the scullery like a
dissolving picture.

A pause followed, while the little clock on the mantel-piece ticked
hurriedly, as if anxious to get on and pass over an awkward moment.

Came then the click of the front-door latch, the flinging open of the
door wide, the bar-like gleam of hastily raised gun-barrels in the new
flood of light, and--silence. Only the one or two late flies "pinged,"
while the little clock fairly raced.

The tall, uncompromising figure of the head-keeper was standing in the
doorway, with a double-barreled 12-bore gun half-raised.

He stood there a moment with his dog, bent a little, peering in. He
had come to find "that there pesky cat." And in this, perhaps, he
showed more sense than most people gave him credit for. Apparently, he
had seen enough to know that the cat was quite unlike any ordinary
cat--and cats of any kind are bad enough--and certainly he guessed that
the cat under control of its master was one, and away from that
questionable influence likely to be another, and very much worse,
calamity.

The keeper searched that cottage from chimney to doorstep. No cat
there. His dog did not, as might have been expected, help him in this
search. Indeed, his dog, he now discovered, had vanished--had, in
fact, gone out at the back-door and cleared off.

Meanwhile the cat was, for his sins, being horribly pricked by the
holly-hedge through which he was sliding. He growled under the
punishment. Ordinary domestic cats do not, as a rule, growl in such
cases, though they may "swear."

Once through the hedge, the cat dropped into the ditch on the other
side, turned to his right, and galloped up it. It ran upwards,
skirting a sloping wet field, to a dark, damp, black wood, as woods
always are that stand on cold clay and have much evergreen growth.
They remind one of a wet, chill rhododendron forest of Tibet.

The cat's gallop was in itself peculiar, loose, lon