This sympathy so sure and yet so delicately conveyed was mine for the trouble of mounting the stairs that led to her drawing-room in Cadogan Gardens. She seemed to be watching my heart the whole time, so that without my asking, without my knowledge even, she could touch each sore spot as it appeared, with the healing finger. For herself she made no claims, and because she did not in any way declare herself to be unhappy, I, after the manner of men, took her happiness for granted. For lives there a man who does not believe that an uncomplaining woman has nothing to complain of? It is his masculine prerogative of density. Besides, does not he himself when hurt bellow like a bull? Why, he argues, should not wounded woman do the same? So, when I wanted companionship, I used to sit in the familiar room and make Adolphus, the Chow dog, shoulder arms with the poker, and gossip restfully with Lola, who sprawled in her old languorous, loose-limbed way among the cushions of her easy chair. Gradually my habitual reserve melted from me, and at last I gave her my whole confidence, telling her of my disastrous pursuit of eumoiriety, of Eleanor Faversham, of the attitude of Society, in fact, of most of what I have set down in the preceding pages. She was greatly interested in everything, especially in Eleanor Faversham. She wanted to know the colour of her eyes and hair and how she dressed. Women are odd creatures. The weeks passed. Besides ministering to my dilapidated spirit, Lola found occupation in looking after the cattery of Anastasius Papadopoulos, which the little man had left in the charge of his pupil and assistant, Quast. This Quast apparently was a faithful, stolid, but unintelligent and incapable German who had remained loyally at his post until Lola found him there in a state of semi-starvation. The sum of money with which Anastasius had provided him had been eked out to the last farthing. The cats were in a pitiable condition. Quast, in despair, was trying to make up his dull mind whether to sell them or eat them. Lola with superb feminine disregard of legal rights, annexed the whole cattery, maintained Quast in his position of pupil and assistant and informed the landlord that she would be responsible for the rent. Then she set to work to bring the cats into their proper condition of sleekness, and, that done, to put them through a systematic course of training. They had been thoroughly demoralised, she declared, under Quast's maladministration, and had almost degenerated into the unhistrionic pussies of domestic life. As for Hephaestus, the great ferocious tom, he was more like an insane tiger than a cat. He flew at the gate over which he used to jump, and clawed and bit it to matchwood, and after spitting in fury at the blazing hoop, sprang at the unhappy Quast as if he had been the contriver of the indignities to which he was being subjected. These tales of feline backsliding I used to hear from Lola, and when I asked