"My poor dear Tuffy, my poor dear Tuffy!" wailed Mrs. Murray. "That wicked girl downstairs has been beating her. I could hear it up here!"
"Well, Mamma, she deserved it, I am sure; and if a cat can't be taught how to behave herself, she will have to go."
"Go!" repeated Mrs. Murray in an excited tone. "What do you mean?"
"Well, Alice told me this morning that either she or the cats would have to leave, and she is such a nice, handy girl that we cannot afford to part with her."
"Now, Mamma," interrupted Arthur, "you cannot spare your pet, of course, but she would be more healthy and not give so much trouble if she was downstairs more. Let her come down to the kitchen to be fed, and have a run round two or three times a day, and then she would be glad to come back to you to be petted."
Mrs. Murray shook her head at the suggestion of this compromise at first, but Molly insisted that the cat must be killed before long if something was not done, and this brought her to reason; and she agreed before they went downstairs that in future she would not feed the cats from her plate, but let them be fed in the kitchen.
"Now we shall save a good many titbits," said Molly, "for in reckoning for Mamma we always had to consider the cats."
This was said when they were once more seated in the dining-room, considering the subject of ways and means for the future.
"This little maid you have got does not cost so much as Hannah?" commented Arthur.
"We only pay her ten pounds a year, and she does not insist that she must have this and that to cook the dinner, because she is willing to do things as we tell her; and we don't have to hear that she has never been used to 'mean, stingy ways.'" Molly laughed as she said this, but Arthur could understand how many little stings poverty had brought into the daily life of his sisters of which he knew nothing, and from which everybody agreed to shelter his mother.