“We had a tortoise-shell cat on the farm when I was a little girl,” remarked Mrs. Lorraine quietly with a gentler look in her eyes than Anna would have believed possible. “Alice, perhaps the kitten would like some milk,” she added. Alice fetched a saucer and put it on the hearth. Mrs. Lorraine placed the kitten beside it as gently as if it had been a fragile egg shell and the three hung over it eagerly. The kitten put his nose in so far that he spluttered amusingly and once he dipped a paw in; but it was too light to overturn the dish and he drank enough to prove himself of sufficient age to be taken from his mother. “Now he’d like a nap,” remarked Anna, picking him up. She wanted to give him to Alice (sweet name, Alice Lorraine!) who hadn’t had a chance at him at all; but she put him into Mrs. Lorraine’s lap and he curled into a yet rounder ball and was asleep at once. “Speaking of tramp cats,” Anna remarked, though as a matter of fact the subject hadn’t come up, “you probably know that Reuben Cartright once lived in this house?” “Reuben Cartright--is he a musician?” asked Mrs. Lorraine. “Dear me, no. His father was a musician, though he wasn’t noted. He was organist at the church for a long time. He built this house, though not with his own hands. Did you ever wonder what that platform was for?” “I thought this was a very old house and that perhaps that was a trundle bed,” said Alice. Anna laughed and Mrs. Lorraine had to smile. “Mr. Cartright had the floor raised so that when he got rich he could have a pipe organ put in,” Anna explained. “I believe the clothes-press in the chamber above is right over the platform and the same size and they say he planned to tear out the floor of that so that the space would go way up to the roof. But it never came to that. His wife died and he took to booze and that was the last of him as well as of the pipe organ.” “Is the son musical?” asked Mrs. Lorraine, speaking softly as if the sleeping kitten were a baby.