and the
thrill of his feet, as Jerry, serious and earnest, padded down his bed
on Nicky's knee.

"I like him best, though," said Nicky, "when he's sleepy and at the same
time bitesome."

"You mustn't let him bite you," Frances said.

"I don't mind," said Nicky. "He wouldn't do it if he didn't like me."

Jerry had dropped off to sleep with his jaws closing drowsily on Nicky's
arm. When it moved his hind legs kicked at it and tore.

"He's dreaming when he does that," said Nicky. "He thinks he's a panther
and I'm buffaloes."

Mr. Parsons laughed at him. "Nicky and his cat!" he said. Nicky didn't
care. Mr. Parsons was always ragging him.

The tutor preferred dogs himself. He couldn't afford any of the
expensive breeds; but that summer he was taking care of a Russian
wolfhound for a friend of his. When Mr. Parsons ran with Michael and
Nicky round the Heath, the great borzoi ran before them with long leaps,
head downwards, setting an impossible pace. Michael and Dorothy adored
Boris openly. Nicky, out of loyalty to Jerry, stifled a secret
admiration. For Mr. Parsons held that a devotion to a cat was
incompatible with a proper feeling for a dog, whence Nicky had inferred
that any feeling for a dog must do violence to the nobler passion.

Mr. Parsons tried to wean Nicky from what he pretended to regard as his
unmanly weakness. "Wait, Nicky," he said, "till you've got a dog of
your own."

"I don't want a dog of my own," said Nicky. "I don't want anything but
Jerry." Boris, he said, was not clever, like Jerry. He had a silly face.

"Think so?" said Mr. Parsons. "Look at his jaws. They could break
Jerry's back with one snap."

"_Could_ he, Daddy?"

They were at tea on the lawn, and Boris had gone to sleep under Mr.
Parsons' legs with his long muzzle on his forepaws.

"He could," said Anthony, "if he caught him."

"But he couldn't catch him. Jerry'd be up a tree before Boris could look
at him."

"If you want Jerry to shin up trees you must keep his weight down."

Nicky laughed. He knew that Boris could never catch Jerry. His father
was only ragging him.

* * * * *

Nicky was in the schoolroom, bowed over his desk. He was doing an
imposition, the second aorist of the abominable verb [Greek: erchomai],
written out five and twenty times. (Luckily he could do the last fifteen
times from memory.)

Nicky had been arguing with Mr. Parsons. Mr. Parsons had said that the
second aoris