Page:Margaret Sherwood--A Puritan in Bohemia.djvu/110

102

A sullen look crept into his eyes. He lashed the couch with his tail.

He wanted to know how to get into the larder. It was this withheld knowledge that made him mew. Life was for him a long fever because of the unequal responses to his demands upon the material world.

Presently his mistress appeared. From the corner she brought a little oak table, and over it threw a white cloth. Then, behind a great brown canvas screen where golden-rod was painted, she made her coffee on a tiny gas stove. The raven, as she called the milkman, put down a jar of cream outside her door. Miserere heard it, and went to sit close by the crack.

Anne smiled when her breakfast was ready. It was all so old-maidish,—the