Well, she found that the knight was certainly not thinking of her one bit. He was sitting staring fixedly at one corner of the apartment, with his lips working in the oddest fashion; twitching this way and that, and parting and showing his teeth, while he was clawing with his hands the chair on which he sat. "Dear me!" said Eileen rather sharply and pettishly, "what is the matter with you?" Eileen spoke pretty crossly; for as she had on various previous occasions seen the knight conduct himself in this sort of way, her feeling was less of alarm at the sight of him than simply of annoyance that at this moment, when she herself had been thinking of him so tenderly, he could be giving his attention to any other thing. "What is the matter with you?" she said; and she raised herself in her chair and turned round her head to see if she could perceive anything worth looking at in that corner into which the knight was staring almost as if the eyes would leap out of his head. "Why, there's nothing there but a mouse!" she said contemptuously, when she had looked and listened for a moment, and heard only a little faint scratching behind the tapestry. "No, no, I believe not; oh, no, nothing but a mouse," replied the knight hurriedly; but still he did not take his eyes from the spot, and he moved from side to side in his chair, and twitched his head from right to left, and looked altogether as if he hardly knew what he was about. "And I am sure a mouse is a most harmless thing," said Eileen. "Harmless? Oh! delicious!" replied the knight, with so much unction that Eileen, in her turn, opened her eyes and stared. "Delicious! quite delicious!" murmured the knight again. But after a moment or two more, all at once he seemed to recollect himself, and made a great effort, and withdrew his eyes from the corner where the mouse was still making a little feeble scratching. "I mean a--a most interesting animal," he said. "I have always felt with regard to mice----" But just at this instant the mouse poked out his little head from beneath the tapestry, and the knight leaped to his feet as if he was shot. "Hiss--s--s! skier--r--r! hiss--s--s--s!" he cried; and--could Eileen believe her eyes?--for one instant she saw the knight flash past her, and then there was nothing living in the room besides her but a great black cat clinging by his claws half-way up the arras, and a little brown mouse between his teeth. Of course the only thing that Eileen could do was to faint, and so she fainted, and it was six hours before she came to herself again. In the mean time nobody in the world knew what had happened; and when she opened her eyes and began to cry out about a terrible black cat, they all thought she had gone out of her mind. "My dear child, I assure you there is no such thing in the house as a black cat," her father said uneasily to her, trying to soothe her in the best way he could. "Oh, yes, he turned into a black cat," cried Eileen.