and very frail, and this is a monster to destroy me, and I love the
light, bright world, and I want to live and to continue to live in the
brightness, and I am so very small, and I'm a good little fellow, with a
good little heart, and I cannot battle with this huge, furry, hungry
thing that is going to devour me, and I want help, help, help. I am
Cocky. Everybody knows me. I am Cocky."

This, and much more, was contained in his two calls of: "Cocky! Cocky!"

And there was no answer from the blind walls, from the hall outside, nor
from all the world, and, his moment of panic over, Cocky was his brave
little self again. He sat motionless on the window-sill, his head cocked
to the side, with one unwavering eye regarding on the floor, so
perilously near, the eternal enemy of all his kind.

The human quality of his voice had startled the gutter-cat, causing her
to forgo her spring as she flattened down her ears and bellied closer to
the floor.

And in the silence that followed, a blue-bottle fly buzzed rowdily
against an adjacent window-pane, with occasional loud bumps against the
glass tokening that he too had his tragedy, a prisoner pent by baffling
transparency from the bright world that blazed so immediately beyond.

Nor was the gutter-cat without her ill and hurt of life. Hunger hurt
her, and hurt her meagre breasts that should have been full for the seven
feeble and mewing little ones, replicas of her save that their eyes were
not yet open and that they were grotesquely unsteady on their soft, young
legs. She remembered them by the hurt of her breasts and the prod of her
instinct; also she remembered them by vision, so that, by the subtle
chemistry of her brain, she could see them, by way of the broken screen
across the ventilator hole, down into the cellar in the dark
rubbish-corner under the stairway, where she had stolen her lair and
birthed her litter.

And the vision of them, and the hurt of her hunger stirred her afresh, so
that she gathered her body and measured the distance for the leap. But
Cocky was himself again.

"Devil be damned! Devil be damned!" he shouted his loudest and most
belligerent, as he ruffled like a bravo at the gutter-cat beneath him, so
that he sent her crouching, with startlement, lower to the floor, her
ears wilting rigidly flat and down, her tail lashing, her head turning
about the room so that her eyes might penetrate its obscurest corners in
quest of the human whose vo