‘When I think of my brave father and of my darling mother, so cozy and so kind, and of how they mysteriously disappeared, I can’t brace up,’ said Sally. ‘I am sure we are going to starve.’ ‘Not while I have my good right paw,’ said Oxford Gray, Junior. ‘I will get food for you.’ ‘You? How? What will you get?’ ‘I will catch a mouse,’ said Oxford Gray, Junior, magnificently. ‘Our father was a mighty hunter.’ ‘But you are hardly larger than a mouse yourself,’ said Sally. ‘Father said so.’ ‘That was a very long time ago,’ said her brother. ‘I have grown since then, and there must be many baby mice just as there are small kittens. I will be on the lookout for a very young mouse, Sally.’ ‘I am sure we shall starve before you can catch a mouse,’ said Sally, ‘for there don’t seem to be any around. We can’t live on flies, and they are very hard to catch.’ If Sally had been a little girl, she would have cried bitterly, but, being a kitten, she was more self-controlled. ‘Where are we going to get our next meal?’ she persisted. ‘It will somehow come,’ said Oxford Gray, Junior, who was an optimist. He sometimes provoked Sally very much, for she was sure she saw things as they really were. ‘We got some milk other days at that little house,’ he said. ‘Yes, but it is closed to-day,’ she reminded him. ‘Other houses will be open,’ said Oxford Gray, Junior. He glanced up as he spoke and looked first at one of the two houses that were near the Wild Wood and then at the other. One house was very attractive, lying low in the valley with a pretty garden and a giant rhododendron tree on either side of the front door. The buds were swelling and beginning to show a hint of crimson. ‘We’ll try to get food at that house,’ said Oxford Gray, Junior. ‘Don’t you remember what father told us about that house?’ said Sally. ‘He said it had the secret mark that is only known to cats, that says, “No cats need apply here for food. This is a no-good house.”’ ‘Yes, I remember now,’ said her brother, ‘but father said the other house was all right. That has a secret mark that says, “Welcome, Cats.”’ ‘We are not cats,’ said Sally. ‘We are such small kittens I am afraid no one will see us; father called us “kittenettes,”’ and at the memory of her father, Sally once more looked very sad. ‘What’s the use of worrying?’ said Oxford Gray, Junior. ‘Something always has turned up and something always will.’ ‘That is rather an ugly house, I think,’ said Sally, as she looked at the gray house on the hill that said, in its secret language, ‘Welcome, Cats.’ ‘It seems all pointed roofs and it hasn’t such a pretty garden as the other house.’ ‘I don’t care about its looks,’ said her brother. ‘Don’t you remember how mother once said, “Handsome is that handsome does,” when you wished you were an Angora with long yellow fur?’ ‘Yes, I remember,’ said Sally, ‘but I wish I were a yellow Angora just the same. I’d like to be a handsome kitten.’