“Don’t call me Miss Miller, please. Nobody does. And—may I come in?” asked Anna.
“I am so sorry, Miss—Anna, but mother—we don’t have company, you know.”
“But I’m not company. And anyhow, I’ve got to come in this once for I’ve got something for you,” Anna declared.
As the proud look returned to the older girl’s face and she started to say something in regard to her mother, Anna drew forth from the covert of her jacket a tiny ball of a maltese kitten with a white parting between its baby blue eyes, a line of white waistcoat, and four white paws, two of which had extra toes. Nothing could have been rounder or silkier or more altogether appealing than this baby kitten with its round, innocent eyes and its bit of pink tongue visible, and as Anna held it out, the other girl took it ecstatically and held it close to her face. Then she cried out impulsively to her mother and ran with it to her. Anna followed her in, closing the door behind her.
Anna’s purpose had been deliberate. Still, it was almost unbelievable to see Mrs. Lorraine’s grimness melt before that absurd mite of kitten. As her daughter passed it over to her, she, too, hid her face against its softness. Then she put it in her lap and gazed at it in a sort of fascination, her daughter hanging over her and quite unnecessarily calling attention to the little thing’s charms. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Lorraine hadn’t handled—hadn’t even seen—a baby kitten of the ordinary, harmless, necessary cat-kind since she had been a child in a New England farmhouse and had worshipped the successive litters of a three-coloured Tabby that had lived at one of the barns. They had left the farm for the city before she was twelve; but though she had had pets in the elegant home her parents had fallen heirs to and in the magnificent residences of the millionaire she had married, they had been the expensive, pedigreed sophisticated pets of the rich and hadn’t appealed to her as Tabby and her kittens and the mongrel shepherd dog of the farm had done. And not even the latter had so appealed to her as this tiny plebeian offspring of a too prolific Tabby mother who kept the tender-hearted Anna busy in finding homes for her numerous kittens. Her sore heart could reach out to its innocence without injury to her wounded pride.
“It is a love, isn’t it?” remarked Anna presently, partly to call attention to herself and partly because she couldn’t help it. For she was herself ‘crazy over’ the kitten, as she put it. And joining the little group, she pointed out its double paws and the white tip of its tail which were the only details the daughter hadn’t exclaimed over.
“I started out right after school to find a home for it. There were three of them but the grocer at the Hollow took the yellow twins—I suppose he’ll call ’em the Gold-Dust Twins. It looks as if I needn’t go further. Are you willing to take him in, Mrs. Lorraine?”
“I don’t know that we ought to,” returned Mrs. Lorraine, trying to speak stiffly. But somehow, even the thought that perhaps it would be wrong for the family of a criminal to indulge themselves even so little was ineffectual to stiffen her with that soft little ball in her lap.
“Mother!” cried the girl beseechingly.
“You will need a cat, you know. Every household does,” said Anna sagely. “This one will make a fine one, too. All of Tabby’s kittens do. Never a one has failed to give satisfaction in the households in which I have placed them. Ma’s never had any mice in our house since I brought the mother-cat home. I found her on a lonely road a mile or more from any house. Just think, someone had abandoned her. It must have been someone in Wenham that came over to drop poor Tabby, for before there wasn’t a three-coloured cat in all Farleigh.”