m wrinkled Death, that seemed sitting on the
doorstep of that house huddled up like a beggar, waiting for the door to
be opened!

I was bored till I grew malignant. I confess it. And, feeling malignant,
I began to long more and more passionately to vent myself on someone or
something. I looked at the cat, which, as usual, was sitting before the
fire.

Animals have intuitions as keen as those of a woman, keener than those
of a man. They inherit an instinct of fear of those who hate them from a
long line of ancestors who have suffered at the hands of cruel men.
They can tell by a look, by a motion, by the tone of a voice, whether
to expect from anyone kindness or malignity. The cat had purred
complacently on the first day of my arrival, and had hunched up her
white, furry back towards my hand, and had smiled with her calm,
light-blue eyes. Now, when I approached her, she seemed to gather
herself together and to make herself small. She shrank from me. There
was--as I fancied--a dawning comprehension, a dawning terror in her blue
eyes. She always sat very close to my grandmother now, as if she sought
protection, and she watched me as if she were watching for an intention
which she apprehended to grow in my mind.

And the intention came.

For, as the days went on, and my grandmother still lived, I began to
grow desperate. My holiday time was over now, but my parents wrote
telling me to stay where I was, and not to think of returning to school.
My grandmother had caused a letter to be sent to them in which she said
that she could not part from me, and added that my parents would never
have cause to regret interrupting my education for a time. "He will be
paid in full for every moment he loses," she wrote, referring to me.

It seemed a strange taste in her to care so much for a boy, but she had
never loved women, and I was handsome, and she liked handsome faces. The
brutality in my nature was not written upon my features. I had smiling,
frank brown eyes, a lithe young figure, a gay boy's voice. My movements
were quick, and I have always been told that my gestures were never
awkward, my demeanour was never unfinished, as is the case so often with
lads at school. Outwardly I was attractive; and the old woman, who had
married two husbands merely for their looks, delighted in feeling that
she had the power to retain me by her side at an age when most boys
avoid old people as if they were the pestilence.

And then I pretende