It is not easy to understand how that could have happened.

I discovered the defect by accident.

I was half-way up the hall stairs one day at home, and was leading her by the hand, when I glanced back through the open door of the dining-room and saw what I thought she would recognise as a pretty picture.

It was "Stray Kit," the slender, the graceful, the sociable, the beautiful, the incomparable, the cat of cats, the tortoise-shell, curled up as round as a wheel and sound asleep on the fire-red cover of the dining-table, with a brilliant stream of sunlight falling across her.

I exclaimed about it, but Susy said she could see nothing there, neither cat nor table-cloth.