d to love her, and obeyed all her insufferably
tiresome behests. But I longed to wreak vengeance upon her all the same.
My dearest friend, the fellow with whom I was to have spent my holidays,
was leaving at the end of this term which I was missing. He wrote to
me furious letters, urging me to come back, and reproaching me for my
selfishness and lack of affection.

Each time I received one I looked at the cat, and the cat shrank nearer
to my grandmother's chair.

It never purred now, and nothing would induce it to leave the room where
she sat. One day the servant said to me:

"I believe the poor dumb thing knows my mistress can't last very much
longer, sir. The way that cat looks up at her goes to my heart. Ah! them
beasts understand things as well as we do, I believe."

I think the cat understood quite well. It did watch my grandmother in
a very strange way, gazing up into her face, as if to mark the changing
contours, the increasing lines, the down-droop of the features, that
bespoke the gradual soft approach of death. It listened to the sound of
her voice; and as, each day, the voice grew more vague, more weak and
toneless, an anxiety that made me exult dawned and deepened in its blue
eyes. Or so I thought.

I had a great deal of morbid imagination at that age, and loved to weave
a web of fancies, mostly horrible, around almost everything that entered
into my life. It pleased me to believe that the cat understood each new
intention that came into my mind, read me silently from its place
near the fire, tracked my thoughts, and was terror-stricken as they
concentrated themselves round a definite resolve, which hardened and
toughened day by day.

It pleased me to believe, do I say? I did really believe, and do believe
now, that the cat understood all, and grew haggard with fear as my
grandmother failed visibly. For it knew what the end would mean for it.

That first day of my arrival, when I saw my grandmother in her white
cap, with her white face and hands, and the big white cat sitting
near to her, I had thought there was a similarity between them. That
similarity struck me more forcibly, grew upon me, as my time in the
house grew longer, until the latter seemed almost a reproduction of
the former, and after each letter from my friend my hate for the two
increased. But my hate for my grandmother was impotent, and would always
be so. I could never repay her for the _ennui_, the furious, forced
inactivity which