But enough has been said to account for the cat’s love of study when the theatre was vacated by the pupils, and upon this particular occasion, taking little heed of Mr Morris, Tom went on investigating with his nose till he had reached the end of one series of desks, and, bounding across the intervening space, he came down with a thump upon the next, making Mr Morris look up sharply, snatch up a pocket lexicon, and send it flying, in company with the words, “Tsh! Cat!”
The next moment he was alone; and, in perfect satisfaction with the stiffness of his papers, he descended from his place and proceeded to lay neatly along the rows before him a carefully doubled set of half-a-dozen sheets of white blotting-paper, till one stood out clear and clean upon every pupil’s desk.
This done, he proceeded to work his way back by placing a blue printed sheet of foolscap upon each improvised blotting-pad. It was all carefully and neatly done, for Mr Morris’s mathematical brain led him to square the paper parallelograms, as he would have termed them, with the greatest exactitude, before going away to his own desk to gaze back over the blue and white patchwork before him, and give utterance once more to his thoughts regarding the puzzledom which would exist the next morning when the boys took their places.
“A magnificent mental exercise,” he said proudly, before marching slowly down the big room like a mathematical general surveying the field where he was to do battle next day with the enemy in the shape of sloth and ignorance.
So wrapped up was he in self that he passed out without noticing that he was watched by one who waited till he was out of sight, and then, though the door was open, preferred to enter by the window, leap on to a desk, and then slowly proceed from one to the other; not in a bold open way, but in a slinking, snaky, crawling fashion, as if about to spring upon some object of prey.
The peculiarity of this was that it necessitated great extension of person; and as, after the fashion of all cats save those that belong to the Isle of Man, Tom carried his tail behind him, he went on in ignorance of the fact that more than once the furry end touched lightly in a more than usually well-filled ink-well, the result being an inky trail, which, however, dried rapidly in the warm theatre, and was not likely to excite notice upon unpainted desk-lids which were dotted with the blots and smudges made by hundreds of boys.
But sometimes great discoveries come from very small things, and Wrench’s Tom played his part in one of the little comedies of life, those of Terence and Plautus not being intended here.