This time the kitten had found a good hiding-place, and the little girls searched everywhere in vain for a long while. At last Maisie thought of lifting the silk cover on the top of Miss Mervyn’s work-basket, and there, snugly coiled in the midst of wools, knitting, and fancy work, lay the white kitten fast asleep! This was not the worst, for it had evidently amused itself first by a game of play. All the skeins of wool were twisted up in a tangle, and a quantity of silk was wound tightly round its claws.
“There!” said Philippa, “that’s the third wrong thing it’s done to-day! It’s torn mother’s lace, and scratched my arm, and tangled up all Miss Mervyn’s wool. Now she’ll want it to go away more than ever.”
Maisie looked at the white kitten with dismay. It did not seem to have made a good beginning in its new home.
“Will Miss Mervyn be very angry?” she said. “Can’t we try to put the wool straight?”
“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” said Philippa coolly; “but it is a naughty kitten, isn’t it?”
Maisie lifted the kitten carefully out of its warm bed, and gently disentangled its claws from the silk.
“Well,” she said, “I don’t really believe it meant to be naughty. Kittens always like to play, and then, you see, it always slept in a basket, so perhaps it thought this was its own. You must give it a ball or a cork, and then it won’t want to play with the wrong things.”
Philippa generally looked down upon Maisie and thought her babyish, but she had such motherly ways with the kitten, and gave advice with so much gravity, that she now listened with respect to what she said.
“Now you take it and nurse it a little,” she continued, putting the kitten, still half asleep, into Philippa’s arms, “and I’ll try to get the wool straight. What shall you call it? We call ours ‘Darkie,’ because he’s all black, you see. Dennis wanted to call him ‘Nigger,’ but I didn’t like that, and Aunt Katharine says Darkie means just the same.”
Philippa thought of a good many names, but was not satisfied with any of them, and still less with those suggested by Maisie.