When Cromartie had settled down and had been reading for a little while, there were no visitors for two or three minutes, and then he heard the negro speaking to himself as he gazed in his direction. “Poor fellow! Poor young fellow! The women do make hay with a man, they do. I’ve been through it all.... I know all about it.... Oh, gracious, yes. Love! Love is the very devil. And that poor young man is certainly in love. Nobody can cheer him up. Nobody can do anything except her that caused the trouble in his heart. There’s nothing I can do for him now except just to pretend to notice nothing, the same as I always do.” At this point the speaker was distracted by the arrival of a party of visitors who stopped outside his cage, but thereafter Mr. Cromartie adopted the same method to the negro that he had always adopted to the public. That is to say, he ignored his existence and contrived never to meet his eyes, and never took the least notice of what he said. The next morning, while Cromartie was playing with his Caracal, with a ball, as he had been accustomed to do before the Orang had taken advantage of him, he heard Josephine’s voice calling to him. He threw the ball to his friend the bounding, tasselled cat, and went straight to her, and without waiting for any greeting she said to him: “John, I love you, and I must see you alone at once. I must come into your cage and talk to you there.” “No, Josephine, don’t--that’s not possible,” said Cromartie. “I can’t go on seeing you like this even, and surely you see that if you were to come into my cage I could not bear it after you had gone away.” “But I don’t want to go away,” said Josephine. “If you were ever to come inside my cage you would have to stay for ever,” said Cromartie. He had recovered himself now, his moment of weakness was past. “And if you don’t decide to do that, I don’t think we can go on seeing each other at all. I think I shall die if I see you like this. We can never be happy together.” “Well, we had better be unhappy together than unhappy apart,” said Josephine. She had suddenly begun to cry. “My darling creature,” said Cromartie, “it’s all a silly mistake; but we will arrange things somehow. I’ll get the curator to have you in the next cage to me instead of that damned nigger, and we shall see each other all the time.” Josephine shook her head vigorously to get the tears out of her eyes, like a dog that has been swimming. “No, that won’t do,” she declared angrily, “that won’t do at all. It has got to be the same cage as yours or I won’t live in a cage at all. I haven’t come here to live in a cage by myself. I’ll share yours and be damned to everyone else.”