It was an afternoon of silver frost and sunshine under a pale blue December sky. The walks of Kensington Gardens were thronged with children whose vivid laughter made Mary feel of less account in the human scene than one of the skeleton leaves lying on a bed of last year's flowers. She tried to escape from the sounds of youth and merriment; but wherever she walked the air was full of laughter, the crystalline air tinkled with laughter. Had Pierrette wanted her at the end? Had she failed the one living creature in the whole world that might have looked to her? Question for evermore unanswerable, regret for evermore unquenchable, longing for evermore unappeasable! She had not felt able to revisit the room where she had left Pierrette sitting so cosily by the fire, when she set out to Gloucestershire; and yet she had been able to decide to go back to the house in Paris which without Pierrette would seem emptier, vaster, lonelier than ever. If now she could pray! For what? For mercy upon her old age. For something to lead her out of the shadows. Darling little cat! Not ever again to feel those silken chocolate paws. Not ever again to hear that deep miaow, nor behold those unyielding eyes of blue, nor watch that absurd tail respond to her lightest murmur on the assumption that any sound uttered in an empty room was intended for herself. An empty room? Empty indeed now, a thousand times emptier now that Pierrette was dead. If she could only pray! Would that serene daughter of hers be able to pray if she found herself alone like this under the trees that looked not a day older than when forty years ago she had walked beneath their boughs with Mac? Would not Muriel suffer a dismay? Would not she doubt the value of her prayers? There would be no communication with the spirit of Pierrette. There would be no deep-voiced miaows scrawled by _la planchette_, not with the help of all the auto-suggestion in her being. She was irrevocably vanished, as irrevocably as a flower. The little cat was not. Her grace and beauty were lost; her lithe and shapely form was destroyed. Her memory would endure for a little while until her friend died; and when she died there would never have been a cat called Pierrette. She would be less than one of the crushed shells among these myriads of crushed shells that were strewn upon the walks of Kensington Gardens. How heedless was the laughter of the children all around her, and yet there were few of those children who would not themselves know sorrow before they were old. Would they hear then the echo of their youth's heedless laughter? When Mary came back to the house in Paris she found a letter waiting for her. 92 Carminia Road, Balham, S.W., _December 26, 1920_. _Dear Madam_,