A sharp cry broke in upon her wonderings. It was the cry of an animal in utter pain—in blind, unreasoning agony. Rose-Marie was on her feet at the first moment that it cut, quiveringly, through the air. With eyes distended she whirled about to face a small boy who knelt upon the ground behind her bench.
To Rose-Marie the details of the small boy's appearance came back, later, with an amazing clarity. Later she could have described his dark, sullen eyes, his mouth with its curiously grim quirk at one corner, his shock of black hair and his ragged coat. But at the moment she had the ability to see only one thing—the scrawny gray kitten that the boy had tied to the iron leg of the bench; the shrinking kitten that the boy was torturing with a cold, relentless cruelty.
It shrieked again—with an almost human cry—as she started around the bench toward it. And the wild throbbing of her heart told her that she was witnessing, for the first time, a phase of human nature of which she had never dreamed.
V
ROSE-MARIE COMES TO THE RESCUE
Rose-Marie's hand upon the small boy's coat collar was not gentle. With surprising strength, for she was small and slight, she jerked him aside.
"You wicked child!" she exclaimed, and the Young Doctor would have chuckled to hear her tone. "You wicked child, what are you doing?"
Without waiting for an answer she knelt beside the pitiful little animal that was tied to the bench, and with trembling fingers unloosed the cord that held it, noting as she did so how its bones showed, even through its coat of fur. When it was at liberty she gathered it close to her breast and turned to face the boy.
He had not tried to run away. Even with the anger surging through her, Rose-Marie admitted that the child was not—in one sense—a coward. He had waited, brazenly perhaps, to hear what she had to say. With blazing eyes she said it:
"Why," she questioned, and the anger that made her eyes blaze also put a tremor into her voice, "why were you deliberately hurting this kitten? Don't you know that kittens can feel pain just as much as you can feel pain? Don't you know that it is wicked to make anything suffer? Why were you so wicked?"