nce of the cat with
profound attention and without interfering. Then he called to the animal
by name.

"Smoke, you mysterious beastie, what in the world are you about?" he
said, in a coaxing tone.

The cat looked up at him for a moment, smiling in its ecstasy, blinking
its eyes, but too happy to pause. He spoke to it again. He called to it
several times, and each time it turned upon him its blazing eyes, drunk
with inner delight, opening and shutting its lips, its body large and
rigid with excitement. Yet it never for one instant paused in its short
journeys to and fro.

He noted exactly what it did: it walked, he saw, the same number of
paces each time, some six or seven steps, and then it turned sharply and
retraced them. By the pattern of the great roses in the carpet he
measured it. It kept to the same direction and the same line. It behaved
precisely as though it were rubbing against something solid.
Undoubtedly, there was something standing there on that strip of carpet,
something invisible to the doctor, something that alarmed the dog, yet
caused the cat unspeakable pleasure.

"Smokie!" he called again, "Smokie, you black mystery, what is it
excites you so?"

Again the cat looked up at him for a brief second, and then continued
its sentry-walk, blissfully happy, intensely preoccupied. And, for an
instant, as he watched it, the doctor was aware that a faint uneasiness
stirred in the depths of his own being, focusing itself for the moment
upon this curious behaviour of the uncanny creature before him.

There rose in him quite a new realization of the mystery connected with
the whole feline tribe, but especially with that common member of it,
the domestic cat--their hidden lives, their strange aloofness, their
incalculable subtlety. How utterly remote from anything that human
beings understood lay the sources of their elusive activities. As he
watched the indescribable bearing of the little creature mincing along
the strip of carpet under his eyes, coquetting with the powers of
darkness, welcoming, maybe, some fearsome visitor, there stirred in his
heart a feeling strangely akin to awe. Its indifference to human kind,
its serene superiority to the obvious, struck him forcibly with fresh
meaning; so remote, so inaccessible seemed the secret purposes of its
real life, so alien to the blundering honesty of other animals. Its
absolute poise of bearing brought into his mind the opium-eater's words
that "no dignit