“She’s two shades of gray,” she said to Mrs. Carter. “Such lovely dark stripes and then light ones; and there are thirteen stripes on her tail—first a dark and then a light, and so on; and her eyes are the shiniest things—most as bright as lights, only they are a kind of green; and she has a purr you can hear all across the room. Her name is Lady Jane, and she’ll come for it.”
Mrs. Carter came back to the telephone presently. “There has been a gray cat around,” she said, “but she isn’t here now. If she comes back I’ll send one of the boys up with her.”
“One of the boys,” said Peggy to Alice, “so there must be two anyhow.”
The day passed and nothing was heard of the cat, and once more the little girls had to go to bed with anxious hearts. It was still raining when the children waked up the next morning, and no pussy had yet appeared. They wanted to go back and hunt for her themselves, but it was too wet for so long a tramp, and, besides, Mrs. Owen was sure Mrs. Carter was too busy getting settled in her new house to want visitors.
“You don’t seem a bit worried about Lady Jane, mother,” said Peggy.
“I have a few other things to think about, and I am sure she is all right.”
It was a three days’ storm, and it was so wet on Sunday that they did not go to church or Sunday School. The day seemed very long. They helped their mother get dinner and they washed and wiped the inside dishes for her. They both liked to wash better than to wipe—it was such fun to splash the mop about in the soapy water.
“It is my turn to wash to-day,” Alice reminded Peggy.
“But you are so slow,” said Peggy. “I can do it a lot faster. However, it is your turn,” she said, handing the mop to Alice with a little sigh.
It was toward the end of the afternoon and they were beginning to get tired of reading when the door bell rang.