But Mr. Neatby had screwed his courage to the sticking-place, and even the tempestuous entry of the kitten could not turn him from his purpose. Penknife in hand, he cut the string of the bonnet-box, and lifted the lid timidly, prepared no doubt for some tissue-paper protected “confection” within. When, lo! even as that of the shoe-box on the previous night was this interior; hay, dry and fragrant of stable, met his astonished gaze, while seated in its midst was a tabby kitten, who gathered herself together for a spring the instant the lid was lifted, and sprang with such good-will as to turn the box over on its side, when she immediately dashed under the table.
Mr. Neatby gazed, as if hypnotized, at the tumbled box, till the rattling of dishes outside warned him of the near approach of his landlady with lunch, and roused him from his trance.
He stooped hastily, thrust the scattered hay into the band-box, clapped on the lid, and placed it under the knee-hole of his writing-table.
The door was opened rather suddenly to admit Mrs. Vyner; kitten number one descended from the curtain, and Mr. Neatby found himself almost praying that kitten number two would stay under the table while his landlady was in the room. Mrs. Vyner glanced disdainfully in the direction of the band-box, noted that the string had been cut, set the dishes on the table with somewhat unnecessary violence, and departed without having opened her lips, just as the two kittens frisked out from beneath the table.
Mr. Neatby, harrassed and flushed “all over his eminent forehead,” did not begin his lunch. He went back to the band-box again, studied the label anew, and finally rummaged in the hay inside.
His search was rewarded by the discovery of a rather dirty piece of paper, on which was written “A Present from Framilode,” Framilode being a village in the neighborhood, celebrated for the manufacture of a certain kind of mug which always bore that legend. He put it carefully beside the other card and label in his desk, and returned to his lunch with but small appetite, and a frown of perplexity upon his brow. The kittens set up a perfect chorus of mewing; Mr. Neatby braced himself to explain the new arrival to Mrs. Vyner, and rang for the pudding.
“It’s my belief, sir,” said Mrs. Vyner that evening, “that somebody’s a puttin’ a ’oaf upon you. I sent my niece to that there Madame Looeese’s with the box lid, an’ she see madame ’erself, and she says as it’s a hold box, an’ that they certainly never sent you no box, nor wouldn’t think of such a liberty, and you one of the school gentlemen and all. But my niece, she said as madame did laugh when she ’eard about the kitten, and ’er young ladies, too.”
Mr. Neatby writhed.
To a man of his reserved and sensitive temperament, the reflection that his name could by any possibility be bandied about by a milliner and her assistants was little short of maddening. If he could then and there have ordered Mrs. Vyner “to take five hundred lines,” it might have given him some relief. But in all things he was a just man, and he knew that his landlady had at all events meant kindly in trying to discover the perpetrator of the outrage; for the fact remained that somebody had most assuredly “put a ’oax” on him in the shape of the liveliest of tabby kittens.