Do you remember her slow, insolent porte, her airs of caste? How she lapped milk, delicately, dubiously, to oblige you, not herself? How she would sit in the fireside circle o’ nights, her paws doubled under her, discreet, unobtrusive, yet so obviously a visitor, that she made Father, who is a family man, feel uncomfortable? How she would edge in graceful reproof from the uninvited, stroking hand? With what silent savagery she fought you if you took her on your knee? No cat to whom I have belonged has ever treated me as Topaz did; at best—with resignation as having a nice taste in eiderdowns on a rainy night; at worst—ignoring me as subtly as she ignored the fluttered but inaccessible canary. Yet I did my best for her, always brushed her, never washed her, obeyed barefooted, in the chillest hours, her peremptory mew. Not that she was consciously ungrateful. I think she knew that I meant well. But she never permitted me for an instant to imagine that I understood her—I, who flatter myself that I appreciate poor pussy more than most! And then the house next door was taken at last, by a ramshackle, elastic family with a studio, who hung out their washing in the front garden as well as the back. We did not call upon them. But Topaz did. Call? She adopted them! She, who would not be handled, patted even, I have seen, her claws full of bark, hauled from a tree by her tail and carried limply, head downwards, under the arm of the youngest son; or rolling on her back in the gravel, ecstatically appreciative of Mrs. Next Door’s thimble under her ear. She sat about on their shoulders, their laps, wherever she could get: caught their mice, drank their skim milk, allowed them to wash her in one bath with the terrier pup. Why? Heaven knows! She liked them. They were her sort. Yet I am sure we were a much nicer family than the people next door. She never quite forgot us: was even, as if in apology, a shade more friendly than before. For a long time, indeed, she paid a daily call of courtesy, sitting a dignified half-hour on what had been her chair, before retiring again to her spiritual home; but one always felt that she did it as a matter of duty. And when the Next Doors moved on, her visits ceased. We missed her, just a little, and made half-hearted inquiries, but there it ended. The Next Doors must have taken her with them. At any rate we never set eyes on Topaz again. All this I tell you because I am sure that what I feel about Topaz is what Aunt Adela felt about Laura and the Clouds. Laura, you see, adopted the Clouds. From the day when Justin carried her home to his mother, to the end at least of this story, she was theirs, body and soul, clinging to them, shyly, unobtrusively, yet with the delicate tenacity of a white rose-bush adopting a south wall.