The poodle was always in the way, to be sure, but even his ugly black head seemed to lose some of its ugliness and ferocity when Lilian laid her pretty hand on it. On the whole, I think that the Currie family were well disposed toward me, the colonel considering me as a harmless specimen of the average eligible young man,--which I certainly was,--and Mrs. Currie showing me favour for my mother’s sake, for whom she had taken a strong liking. As for Lilian, I believed I saw that she soon suspected the state of my feelings toward her, and was not displeased by it. I looked forward with some hopefulness to a day when I could declare myself with no fear of a repulse. But it was a serious obstacle in my path that I could not secure Bingo’s good opinion on any terms. The family would often lament this pathetically themselves. “You see,” Mrs. Currie would observe in apology, “Bingo is a dog that does not attach himself easily to strangers”--though, for that matter, I thought he was unpleasantly ready to attach himself to _me_. I did try hard to conciliate him. I brought him propitiatory buns, which was weak and ineffectual, as he ate them with avidity, and hated me as bitterly as ever; for he had conceived from the first a profound contempt for me, and a distrust which no blandishments of mine could remove. Looking back now, I am inclined to think it was a prophetic instinct that warned him of what was to come upon him through my instrumentality. Only his approbation was wanting to establish for me a firm footing with the Curries, and perhaps determine Lilian’s wavering heart in my direction; but, though I wooed that inflexible poodle with an assiduity I blush to remember, he remained obstinately firm. Still, day by day, Lilian’s treatment of me was more encouraging; day by day I gained in the esteem of her uncle and aunt; I began to hope that soon I should be able to disregard canine influence altogether. Now there was one inconvenience about our villa (besides its flavour of suicide) which it is necessary to mention here. By common consent all the cats of the neighbourhood had selected our garden for their evening reunions. I fancy that a tortoise-shell kitchen cat of ours must have been a sort of leader of local feline society--I know she was “at home,” with music and recitations, on most evenings. My poor mother found this to interfere with her after-dinner nap, and no wonder; for if a cohort of ghosts had been “shrieking and squealing,” as Calpurnia puts it, in our back garden, or it had been fitted up as a creche for a nursery of goblin infants in the agonies of teething, the noise could not possibly have been more unearthly. We sought for some means of getting rid of the nuisance: there was poison, of course; but we thought it would have an invidious appearance, and even lead to legal difficulties, if each dawn were to discover an assortment of cats expiring in hideous convulsions in various parts of the same garden.