Again she did not answer. She only screamed. I was in darkness. I had not saved the candle. I could not see her. I could not feel, because every time I moved I seemed to hit her with another saucepan. I had no matches. I knew of none nearer than the bedroom. I had to leave Leila screaming there. I had to find my way out of that back kitchen, stumbling, as it seemed to me, over all the contents of an ironmonger's shop, and almost knocking out my brains against the partly-opened door. I had to grope my way along the newspaper-covered passages, across the newspaper-covered hall, up the newspaper-covered stairs. I had to hang on to the newspaper-covered banisters. If ever there was a burglar alarm I sounded it. I heard Macgregor and Simon, his mother, indulging in their little playful pranks, above and below me, and everywhere at once. But the servants did not seem to hear anything. No, nothing. I had no means of knowing if Eliza had frightened herself into a fit, and if Mrs. Perkins was dead. As I entered the bedroom I swept a jug and basin off the wash-hand-stand. It sounded as if I had broken the contents of a china shop. But no one seemed to notice it--not even Simon and Macgregor. Such was my state of agitation, and such the confusion of my mind, that I floundered into the middle cupboard of the wardrobe, which, in some mysterious manner, must have opened of its own accord. I had dragged all Leila's dresses off the hooks and half smothered myself beneath them before I discovered where I was. But I found the matches. Oh, yes, I found them after all. I also found Leila. She was sitting up on the kitchen floor, in the midst of the pots and pans, in a frame of mind which, by me, was unexpected. She seemed to be under the impression that my conduct had been base, not to say heartless. She appeared to be under the, to me, extraordinary delusion that I had scrambled in the darkness up the newspaper-covered stairs, and fallen over everything which I could fall over, because I hated her. She wept. It was all I myself could do to refrain from tears. However, we managed to secure Macgregor and his mother in the drawing-room, in which apartment we felt morally persuaded that they would break everything that was worth the breaking. Then Leila insisted upon me rearranging the ingenious little trap which we had laid to catch a burglar. "What," she remarked, as she wiped away a final tear, "was the use of doing a thing at all if we didn't do it properly?" There was wisdom in her unanswerable inquiry, though I could not but feel thankful as I reflected that there were no more cats in the house who could mistake our intentions, and, under an entire misapprehension, turn them topsy-turvy once again.