[p19]
‘Drat the cat,’ said cook; ‘look how he’s messing the floor up.’
And she took away the milk.
Maurice put pride aside and mewed to have the milk put down again. But he did not get it.
Very weary, very thirsty, and very tired of being Lord Hugh, he presently found his way to the schoolroom, where Mabel with patient toil was doing her home-lessons. She took him on her lap and stroked him while she learned her French verb. He felt that he was growing very fond of her. People were quite right to be kind to dumb animals. Presently she had to stop stroking him and do a map. And after that she kissed him and put him down and went away. All the time she had been doing the map, Maurice had had but one thought: Ink!
The moment the door had closed behind her—how sensible people were who closed doors gently—he stood up in her chair with one paw on the map and the other on the ink. Unfortunately, the inkstand top was made to dip pens in, and not to dip paws. But Maurice was desperate. He deliberately upset the ink—most of it rolled over the table-cloth and fell pattering on the carpet, but with what was left he wrote quite plainly, across the map:—
[p20]
‘Please tell Lord Hugh
to stop being
a cat and be Mau
rice again.’
‘There!’ he said; ‘they can’t make any mistake about that.’ They didn’t. But they made a mistake about who had done it, and Mabel was deprived of jam with her supper bread.
Her assurance that some naughty boy must have come through the window and done it while she was not there convinced nobody, and, indeed, the window was shut and bolted.
Maurice, wild with indignation, did not mend matters by seizing the opportunity of a few minutes’ solitude to write:—
‘It was not Mabel
it was Maur
ice I mean Lord Hugh,’