Page:The Lost Prince.djvu/217

 had happened to frighten them, and they had left the house in great haste. Marco turned and stood with his back against the door. The cat had awakened and she was gazing at him with her green eyes. She began to purr encourag- ingly. She really helped Marco to think. He was thinking with all his might and trying to remember. " What did she come for ? She came for some- thing," he said to himself. "What did she say? I only heard part of it, because I was asleep. The voice in the dream was part of it. The part I heard was, ' You will have to search for it. I have not a mo- ment/ And as she ran down the passage, she called back, ' You are too good for the cellar. I like you.' He said the words over and over again and tried to re- call exactly how they had sounded, and also to recall the voice which had seemed to be part of a dream but had been a real thing. Then he began to try his favor- ite experiment. As he often tried the experiment of commanding his mind to go to sleep, so he frequently experimented on commanding it to work for him to help him to remember, to understand, and to argue about things clearly.

" Reason this out for me," he said to it now, quite naturally and calmly. " Show me what it means."

What did she come for? It was certain that she was in too great a hurry to be able, without a reason, to spare the time to come. What was the reason? She had said she liked him. Then she came because