in any friendship worth having a kind of physical exultation. She was fonder of this little cat than of all her Paris friends, much fonder. Pierrette was young. Youth! Youth! It was not that she longed to be young again herself. That would be foolish and indeed an undignified repining; but to be surrounded by youth, that was surely a legitimate desire. "And it's that of which fate has robbed me," she sighed aloud. Pierrette wagged her tail. The sound of her friend's voice was so pleasant to hear, and the silken knee was so delicate a resting-place for a royal cat. This soft-spoken human being deserved a little attention. Her hands were tactful. Not like Célestine's hands. Célestine was the maid who had taken the place of Adèle, dead before her mistress returned to Paris, a move which would have given Adèle so much pleasure. Pierrette did not care for Célestine, who was always lifting her off delightful nests of lace and silk. Célestine, in Pierrette's opinion, had the hands of a butcher rather than of a lady's maid. The thought of Célestine gave her a _fisson_, and she yawned in disgust. Mary held Pierrette so that the cat's equilibrium should not be disturbed while she leaned over to ring the bell. It was morbid to sit here in the twilight thinking about youth. But when François had arranged to his satisfaction the folds of the brocaded curtains and when he had turned on the lights and left the room in a radiancy of rose, Mary could not think about what she called practical things, which meant the _séance_ she had arranged for to-night. Her headache was gone; but the shadows of the past which had crept out of their lurking-places in the twilight were still in the _salon_, not visible indeed, but all the more hauntingly insistent because they were not visible. The room seemed vaster and lonelier now that every corner of it was illuminated. Mary felt infinitely small and utterly deserted. It was only the company of the small cat which kept her from getting up and hurrying away in panic. "_Le demon du midi_," she found herself repeating. What specter begotten of gloom and shadow could outlive the horror that existed in a desert of light? Her nerves were upset. Perhaps she was indulging too frequently in these spiritualistic experiments. But what else was there to do? If she were to renounce all activity, she would just sit shriveling slowly before the fire. After all, sixty was not such a great age. One would have to be at least seventy before one really considered oneself old. And probably even at seventy one would find that seventy was by no means the great age it had formerly seemed. Even eighty? Grandmamma had been eighty when she died. She had looked very old; but had she really felt old? Did anybody ever really feel old? What seemed so bad about the arrangement of human life was the amount of time wasted at the beginning and the end. The first ten years, for example, what were they worth? Mary was watering