"Because at present I have nothing to say. And on that point I happen to have a conscience--some rays of probity, left." He got up as he spoke, and went across the room, to a covered basket beside the fire. "Mimi!" he said caressingly--"poor Mimi!" He raised a piece of flannel, and a Persian kitten lying in the basket--a sick kitten--lifted its head languidly. "_Tu m'aimes_, Mimi?" The kitten looked at him with veiled eyes, already masked with death. Lathrop stooped for a saucer of warm milk standing by the fire. The kitten refused it, but when he dipped his fingers in the milk, it made a momentary effort to lick them, then subsiding, sank to sleep again. "Poor little beast!" said Blaydes--"what's the matter?" "Some poison--I don't know what. It'll die tonight." "Then you'll be all alone?" "I'm never alone," said Lathrop, with decision. And rising he went to the door of the cottage--which opened straight on the hill-side, and set it open. It was four o'clock on a November day. The autumn was late, and of a marvellous beauty. The month was a third gone and still there were trees here and there, isolated trees, intensely green as though they defied decay. The elder trees, the first to leaf under the Spring, were now the last to wither. The elms in twenty-four hours had turned a pale gold atop, while all below was still round and green. But the beeches were nearly gone; all that remained of them was a thin pattern of separate leaves, pale gold and faintly sparkling against the afternoon sky. Such a sky! Bands of delicate pinks, lilacs and blues scratched across an inner-heaven of light, and in the mid-heaven a blazing furnace, blood-red, wherein the sun had just plunged headlong to its death. And under the sky, an English scene of field and woodland, fading into an all-environing forest, still richly clothed. While in the foreground and middle distance, some trees already stripped and bare, winter's first spoil, stood sharply black against the scarlet of the sunset. And fusing the whole scene, hazes of blue, amethyst or purple, beyond a Turner's brush, "What beauty!--my God!" Blaydes came to stand beside the speaker, glancing at him with eyes half curious, half mocking. "You get so much pleasure out of it?" For answer, Lathrop murmured a few words as though to himself, a sudden lightening in his sleepy eyes-- L'univers--si liquide, si pur!-- Une belle eau qu'on voudrait boire. "I don't understand French"--said Blaydes, with a shrug--"not French verse, anyway." "That's a pity," was the dry reply--"because you can't read Madame de Noailles. Ah!--there are Lang's pheasants calling!--his tenants I suppose--for he's left the shooting." He pointed to a mass of wood on his left hand from which the sound came. "They say he's never here?" "Two or three times a year,--just on business. His wife--a little painted doll--hates the place, and they've built a villa at Beaulieu."