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Show I A Little Gray Cat. The talk had got somehow to witchcraft, were- ivolvcs, transmutations of form. "It's quite true," asserted the girl calmly; "I can do it. My other form is that of a little grav cat." Her eyes, which were large, rather round and gray, with innumerable yellow spangles, faced Curtis Cur-tis seriously. Her soft gray gown defined her lithe form smoothly and sinuously. She folded her small hands in her lap with silken deliberation. "I don't doubt it," returned Curtis. "But why do you say your other form C He was pursuing literature rather strenuously, m. but that moment gave him a pang of envy for the i( painter's art. To put in color and form all the j quiet, subtle, mysterious, feminine, feline charm of her! i "I am serious," she said, "lou don't believe ) me!" . "I could believe easier," admitted Curtis, "with f the help of ocular demonstration." J She rose with the noiseless, independent motion that characterized her. "Very well. If you see a little gray cat tomorrow." tomor-row." I will be that cat." "You shall command every luxury," mocked Curtis, "catnip, chicken, cream!" Her grave, baffling eyes ignored his flippancy. "You are sooffing. You will see a little gray cat tomorrow. I will be that cat." Curtis and Flymesser walked home together. , Flymesser had acted as the Westerner's social spon-V spon-V 6or before the book had set every one talking. "Saw you having an absorbing tete-a-tete with Sybil Craydon," observed Flymesser. "Fine girl, Sybil, and plenty of money, to' ! Rather too quiet for some people, but a first-rate little person, I say." "Quite so," assented Curt.s drily. He added more for his own instruction than Flymesser's. "Miss Craydon, if I were to suggest a fault, knows her own points rather too well, and doesn't hesitate to call attention to them." "Well, what are girls for!" retorted Flymesser. Curtis sat at his desk the next morning wrestling wrest-ling against an obsession in the image of a graceful grace-ful little woman in gray. He found himself obliged to compromise with the obsession. Thrusting his work aside impatiently, he began on a fresh sheet. This went better. At last he came out of a trance of absorption with a start. Something made him turn abruptly. There in the center of the room, demurely de-murely regarding him, sat a little gray cat! Curtis rubbed his eyes; for one instant a shiver struck along his blood; then he threw back his head and laughed uproariously. He remembered the open window and the crowded roofs and chimneypots chimney-pots outside his sky-parlor. In one sense Curtis lived high. But what a coicidence and what a cat! Xo fluffy, spoiled Angora, no starved stray of the alleys; but a sleek, dainty creature whose demure de-mure distinction belonged to herself and the entire race of cats. Fure maltesc in color, she folded a lang and supple tail across her feet. "Kitty!" called Curtis, ohlding out his hand. The cat rose, but did not approach him. She walked about the room with an air of quiet, impersonal imper-sonal observation. Curtis loved animals. He made-jjrompt made-jjrompt overtures of friendliness. The cat accepted his petting with staid nonchalance. When he lifted her in his arms she did not resist. lie seated himself him-self at his desk again and placed her on his knee. She sat there, dainty, detached, inscrutable. She turned her smooth head and fixed her eyes, large, round and gray, lit with points of yellow, seriously upon him. If the pupils had been round instead of vertieal! As it was, his heart quickened some beats. "Graygown," said Curtis, aloud, gently stroking her fur, "I think I think I am in love with you! But it, won't do, you know! I've got years of hard work ahead of me. To say nothing of the extreme improbability of my ever getting you to consider it, you're too expensive a luxury for me. That's putting put-ting it brutally, but we may as well face the facts. Besides, you're a witch. What do I want of a witch anyhow? . . . I hope you won't mind being put on a cushion ? Eight here by the fire I So." Graygown accepted the cushion courteously. Presently she got up, strolled soft-footedly about, mounted the window-sill and sprang down upon the confusion of roofs outside. Curtis read over the manuscript on his desk. It .seemed now so little satisfactory that he tore it across, thrust the pieces into the fire and watched them curj and blacken in the grate. Within a week Curtis saw Miss Graydon again. He had most prudently determined to see a.s little of her as he courteously might, but one advantage of being a lion is that you are almost forced sooner or later to meet people you might otherwise choose to avoid. Miss Graydon remarked tranquilly: "I kept my word Friday. You saw I came." Curtis blushed and stammered like a tender criminal caught in the jam closet for the first time. "Well," he managed finally, "I will admit that a cat came, but how do I know it was you ?" As he looked down at her, the gray draperies curled lithely about her, her suave, attentive, impenetrable im-penetrable attitude, her gray, mystic, innocent eyes a thrill that was not superstition but borrowed something from it, ran deliciously along his veins. Quite unconsciously to himself, he took masterful possession of her. He was a very recent lion, you will remember. "You don't believe me," said Miss Graydon. "I wil Itell you what I saw. There is a soft under the window where I went out, and a big brick fireplace at right angles with a wolf -skin run in front ; and a big walnut bookcase full of books; and a walnut writing-table. On the writing-table there is a green cloth covered with ink spots." "Some one told you," said Curtis. "Plymes-ser "Plymes-ser " "There was writing on the table. I saw. It was a poem, all blotted and interlined, and tno name at the top was 'Gods of Egypt.' " Curtis glowered. Xo living eye save his and the cat's could by any possibility have seen those ill-starred ill-starred lines. Curtis fell out of drawing perspective perspec-tive altogether. His big shoulders and rugged head bent forward, he thrust out his lip and contracted his brow with the bare impossibility of the thing in a silence which ignored the small, soft, gray, feline figure at his side. "Young woman," he said, "you ought to bo thankful that the views of Cotton Mather have become be-come obsolete." i, "I am." she said, quietly. "My great-great-great-grandmother was hanged." "It's only fair to warn you," the young man said solonmly, "that if you honor me again in your felina form 1 shall take every means in my power to prevent pre-vent your escape." "Flymesser," demanded Curtis of that worthy, "what is it about Miss Craydon?" "Well, if you can't find out," retorted Plymcs-ser. Plymcs-ser. "with all the chances you're giving yourself " "Oh, cut that out!" growled Curtis. "I mean well, she said her great-grcat-great-grandmother was hanged." "That's quite true," returned Flymesser seriously. serious-ly. "Her great-great-great-grandmother was Mercy Ryder, the witch's daughter of Salem. Goody Ryder Ry-der was hanged in 1693." About this time Curtis developed his theory that an undesirable emotion should be allowed full sweep through the House of Life, being thus most likely to expend itself harmlessly. The theory was in full swing when one day a slight, scrambling sound at the window made his heart leap outrageously; out-rageously; He was developing rheumatism from keeping the window open in unseemly weather. There on the sill crouched the little gray cat. Miss Graydon was not in, he was informed at her door. Where had she gone ? The servant really could not say. As the young- man was turning grimly away, the servant volunteered suddenly that he believed there was some kind of Hart llexibition. Curtis recalled that some one had sent him a card to a private view, and that Miss Graydon had spoken of it in baffling terms. Curtis went to the Art Exhibition. The first person he saw there was Flymesser. "Hello," said Flymesser. "Have you seen the sensation sen-sation of the show? You'll recognize it, of course. But they've taken great pains to keep it out of the newspapers." "Is Miss Graydon here?" said Curtis. "Saw her five minutes ago over in that alcove where the portraits are." She was there in her gray furs. Presently he was alone with her. He drew off his glove and showed his hand. "Look what you did," he said, smiling. "I?" she blushed adorably, and looked up and down with frightened, repentant eyes. "Oh! I am so sorry!" "Are you sorry for me?" Their eyes met for an instant. "Please look at this picture. It is one I am very much interested in. It is made from an old portrait. por-trait. The original was my great-great-grandfather, Matthew Hale. He married the witch's daughter." "I," said Curtis, "am going to marry her great-great-great-granddaughter." She seemed not to hear. "There is another picture pic-ture you must see. It is hung in the main gallery. Come!" He followed blindly. There were more people about this picture, and there was a foolish hum of voices discussing technic and values. At first Curtis Cur-tis did not see very clearly because of the haze that dimmed his eyes and brain. Gradually he perceived per-ceived that there hung before him the clue of a great unraveling, the key of many mysteries. The picture showed a colonial kitchen, its humble hum-ble furniture, spinning-wheel, musket and sanded floor, dwarfed into insignificance by the great fireplace fire-place whose vast chimney yawned across the canvas. can-vas. On a stool beside the fire sat a girl in homespun home-spun gra with a white kerchief drawn about her neck, her soft hair braided down her back, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes upon the blaze. Opposite Oppo-site her sat a gray cat, her tail wrapped daintily over her feet, her eyes upon the blaze. Between them up the cavernous chimney throat fled shadowy things steeple-crowned witch and spitting cat. with vaguer shapes of weird and puzzling import. It was all painted with a breadth and grasp and audacity which claimed the eye, ' challenged the mind, perplexed the heart. What did it mean? What hints of misery? of evil? of agony? How did they touch that quiet mind and the placid cat ? Do the souls of these gentle, fireside creatures, too, ride the night-winds of the world? Curtis' simple man's mind groped for a clue to his own fate in this mocking, haunting pose of the eternal feminine, for the girl and the cat were one like the girl and the eat he knew unmistakably the girl and the cat he knew. "It is called 'The Fireside Sphinx.' " explained Miss Graydon, pointing in her catalogue with a small, gray-gloved "finger, after Agnes Rcpplier's book, you know. Fainted by Alice Ardith. You may have seen her. Her window almost looks into yours." "The sarcastic girl !" stammered Curtis. "My best friend," she observed. Then, stirred cither to pity or confusion beneath his imploring eyes, "I think -I am going home now. If you care to come, too " "But I don't understand " said Curtis, very much later, "how you knew about my room." "Once when I was posing," she murmured, "Sy-billa "Sy-billa ran away, and I climbed out on the roof to get her. She always made for your window; and I knew you lived there; and people were talking about you so much I suppose I must have looked !" "But you couldn't have seen that poem, 'Gods of Egypt'." "Ah! That time!" she drew back from him, the pupils of her round eyes widening. "I looked at you, "and willed to know and I knew! There is witch-blood in me!" "One thing more," asked Curtis reverently. "How did Graygown Sybilla, I mean get away the day I locked her in?" "Why, Alice fished her out over the transom in a basket with catnip in it. And there are such things as telephones, you know. And now," she mused, plaintively, "I have told -everything and you will not care any more!" Curtis replied with the most convincing arguments argu-ments to the contrary which occurred to him, but as these happened not to be verbal, they cannot be herewith reported. "But," she protested, "my great-great-great-grandmother was hanged! Besides, in a way Sybilla Sy-billa is me!" "Graygown!" cried Curtis rapturously. Something furry and purry rubbed against his foot. ii. It was a little gray eat Laura L. Hinkley, in The Home Magazine. |