"I planned to have a wee white kitten," Phil explained, while putting a saucer of milk before the feline tough. "One that would wear a ribbon, you know. You remember, Cousin Roger, how Mother always forbade pets because she believed animals carry germs? I meant to have a puss, if ever I had a home of my own. This one just walked into the kitchen on the first day we came here. Ethan said it was a lucky sign when a cat came to a new home. He gave it the meat out of his sandwiches that we had brought for lunch, and it stayed. So I decided to keep it instead of a kitten. It really is more cat!" What footing was here for dreary terrors? In a mirror across the room I glimpsed my own countenance looking quite as usual. No over-night white hairs appeared; no upstanding look such as the legend gave to Sir Sintram after he met the Little Master. After the meal, Vere asked me to walk over to the lake with him. We strolled through the old orchard toward the dam. This was my side of the house. In passing, I looked up at the window against which the Thing had seemed to press Itself with sickening lust for me. Phillida was framed in the open square, and shook a dustcloth at us by way of greeting and evidence of her busyness. The wide, shallow lake lay almost without movement, except at the head of the dam. There the water poured over with foam and tumult, an amber-brown cataract some twenty-odd feet across, to rush on below in a winding stream that grew calmer as it flowed. "We must put our lake in order, Vere," I observed, as we stood on a knoll at the head of the dam. "All this growth of rank vegetation ought to be pulled up, the banks graded and turfed perhaps, the bottom cleaned up. Water-lilies would look better than cat-tails." To my surprise, he did not assent. Instead, he set his foot on a boulder and rested his arm upon his knee; looking into the clear water. "Mr. Locke, I just about hate saying what I have to," he told me in his sober, leisurely fashion. "I expect you won't like it; not at all. Well--best said before you get deeper in. I can't see my way to make farming this place pay." I was bitterly disappointed. Even at the worst estimate of Vere, I had imagined he would stick the thing out a little longer than this. Poor Phillida's time of happiness should have lasted more than these few weeks. But the call of New York, of the "lounge lizard's" ease and unhealthy excitement had won already, it seemed. I said nothing at all. The blow was too sore. "There are too few acres of arable land, and they're used up," Vere was continuing. "I've seen plenty of impoverished, run-out farms in New England. You could pour money into the soil out of a gold pitcher these five years to come, before it began to pay you back. And then your money might better have been put anywhere in bank, for profit! I saw that, the first week here. Since then I've been looking around for something better to do."