ts high and forbidding against the luminous
night sky. His tail moved with a soft ominous sinuousness as he
looked.

Presently he climbed cautiously out beneath the sash, gathered himself
for a spring, and the next instant was seated on the boundary wall
between his own house and that of Lady Laura's.

Here again he paused. That which served him for a mind, that
mysterious bundle of intuitions and instincts by which he reckoned
time, exchanged confidences, and arranged experiences, informed him
that the night was yet young, and that his friend would not yet be
arrived. He sat there so still and so long, that if it had not been
for his resolute head and the blunt spires of his ears, he would have
appeared to an onlooker below as no more than a humpy finial on an
otherwise regularly built wall. Now and again the last inch of his
tail twitched slightly, like an independent member, as he contemplated
his thoughts.

Overhead the last glimmer of day was utterly gone, and in the place of
it the mysterious glow of night over a city hung high and luminous.
He, a town-bred cat, descended from generations of town-bred cats,
listened passively to the gentle roar of traffic that stood, to him,
for the running of brooks and the sighing of forest trees. It was to
him the auditory background of adventure, romance, and bitter war.

The energy of life ran strong in his veins and sinews. Once and again
as that, which was for him imaginative vision and anticipation,
asserted itself, he crisped his strong claws into the crumbling
mortar, shooting them, by an unconscious muscular action, from the
padded sheaths in which they lay. Once a furious yapping sounded from
a lighted window far beneath; but he scorned to do more than turn a
slow head in the direction of it: then once more he resumed his watch.

The time came at last, conveyed to him as surely as by a punctual
clock, and he rose noiselessly to his feet. Then again he paused, and
stretched first one strong foreleg and then the other to its furthest
reach, shooting again his claws, conscious with a faint sense of
well-being of those tightly-strung muscles rippling beneath his loose
striped skin. They would be in action presently. And, as he did so,
there looked over the parapet six feet above him, at the top of the
trellis up which presently he would ascend, another resolute little
head and blunt-spired cars, and a soft indescribable voice spoke a
gentle insult. It was his friend