he face, but he had had
no practice.

'You are Lord Hugh,' the voice repeated, 'and I am Maurice. I like being
Maurice. I am so large and strong. I could drown you in the water-butt,
my poor cat--oh, so easily. No, don't spit and swear. It's bad
manners--even in a cat.'

'Maurice!' shouted Mr. Basingstoke from between the door and the cab.

Maurice, from habit, leaped towards the door.

'It's no use _your_ going,' said the thing that looked like a giant
reflection of Maurice; 'it's _me_ he wants.'

'But I didn't agree to your being me.'

'That's poetry, even if it isn't grammar,' said the thing that looked
like Maurice. 'Why, my good cat, don't you see that if you are I, I must
be you? Otherwise we should interfere with time and space, upset the
balance of power, and as likely as not destroy the solar system. Oh,
yes--I'm you, right enough, and shall be, till some one tells you to
change from Lord Hugh into Maurice. And now you've got to find some one
to do it.'

('Maurice!' thundered the voice of Mr. Basingstoke.)

'That'll be easy enough,' said Maurice.

'Think so?' said the other.

'But I sha'n't try yet. I want to have some fun first. I shall catch
heaps of mice!'

'Think so? You forget that your whiskers are cut off--Maurice cut them.
Without whiskers, how can you judge of the width of the places you go
through? Take care you don't get stuck in a hole that you can't get out
of or go in through, my good cat.'

'Don't call me a cat,' said Maurice, and felt that his tail was growing
thick and angry.

'You _are_ a cat, you know--and that little bit of temper that I see in
your tail reminds me----'

Maurice felt himself gripped round the middle, abruptly lifted, and
carried swiftly through the air. The quickness of the movement made him
giddy. The light went so quickly past him that it might as well have
been darkness. He saw nothing, felt nothing, except a sort of long
sea-sickness, and then suddenly he was not being moved. He could see
now. He could feel. He was being held tight in a sort of vice--a vice
covered with chequered cloth. It looked like the pattern, very much
exaggerated, of his school knickerbockers. It _was_. He was being held
between the hard, relentless knees of that creature that had once been
Lord Hugh, and to whose tail he had tied a sardine-tin. Now _he_ was
Lord Hugh, and something was being tied to _his_ tail. Something
mysterious, terrible. Very well, he would show that he was