‘I don’t care at all how I look,’ said Oxford Gray, Junior. ‘I’d rather be myself. If you were a yellow Angora with long fur, you would not have me for your twin. How would you like to lose me, Sally?’ At this terrible suggestion, Sally put her paws all the more firmly around her brother’s neck. ‘You are the whole world to me, Oxford Gray, Junior,’ she said; ‘grandmother, and father and mother and brother, too. The others have all disappeared, and you are all I have left. It is sad to be orphans,’ she wailed again, in her thought-transference language; ‘but if one has to be an orphan, it is better to be twins.’ Now Sally and Oxford Gray, Junior, had been so busy about their own concerns that they had not noticed that a lady came to the bow window of the house that said ‘Welcome, Cats,’ in its secret language, and that her eyes rested on the brother and sister in their fur coats, and so it was a great surprise when they saw her come down the piazza steps. They were frightened and scampered off as fast as they could go. The lady put a large blue-and-white dinner plate down on the grass and, looking around her as if searching for the kittens, she went back into the house. ‘Poor darlings,’ she said, and there were tears in her eyes; ‘poor kittens to have lost their mother when they were so young!’ A faint odor of fish greeted the kittens. ‘I do believe there is fish on that plate,’ said Oxford Gray, Junior. ‘Let us go and see.’ When they reached the plate, they saw it had on it a large piece of mackerel cut in mouthfuls that would just suit them and some potato and green vegetable about the color of grass. Perhaps it was cooked grass. They had never seen it before. It had a most satisfying smell. Then the hungry kittens leaned over the blue-and-white plate, one on one side and one on the other, and they hungrily ate the delicious fish. Sally ate daintily and slowly, but Oxford Gray, Junior, gobbled his portion down very fast and then ate what was left of Sally’s share. Sally hit him with her paw. There were things that even the gentle Sally could not stand. ‘That isn’t fair,’ she said. ‘I need more to keep me alive than you do,’ said Oxford Gray, Junior. ‘If I am going to hunt for food for the pair of us, I have to be well fed.’ ‘Do you think you could catch fish?’ Sally asked. ‘I like fish even better than mouse.’ ‘Father was a mighty hunter, but I never heard that he was a fisherman,’ said her brother. ‘I am afraid I shall have to stick to hunting. But we are all right for to-day, Sally. Always trust to me. Did not I tell you something would turn up?’ [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER II THE COLD NIGHT It rained that afternoon, a cold piercing rain and the thermometer went down. Nothing like the cold had been known for years in the month of May. But the kittens did not know this, as they had only weeks to judge by. They were afraid this sort of weather might last for many days.