Shaws. Desdemona had learned more during the past few weeks than in all
the rest of her life. Sustained effort for others and consistent
self-sacrifice had set their distinctive seal upon a merely beautiful
young animal; and now she had elements of grandeur and dignity, of
fineness and nobility, such as no amount of human care and kindness can
give even to the handsomest of creatures. She had gone out into the open
to meet life and deal with it in her own way; she had brought new life
into the world, and nurtured it with loving devotion and
self-forgetfulness; she had freely courted some of the severest of
Nature's tests, and withstood them with credit to herself. So that,
whatever the show judges might have said or thought, she was a finer,
better creature to-day than she had ever been at Shaws.

As the days slipped past in that early summer-time, the black-and-gray
dog pup thrived wonderfully in Desdemona's cave. Having keen sight now
in addition to the wonderful sense of smell which was his at birth, the
black-and-gray had become a definite person already. Young though he
was, he already knew the taste of rabbit's flesh, and would growl
masterfully at his own mother if she claimed his attention--say, for a
washing--when he had stolen one of her bones, and was busily engaged in
gnawing and scraping it with his pin-point teeth. When Finn appeared,
this masterful youngster would waddle purposely forward, growling at
times so forcibly as to upset his precarious equilibrium.

Twice he had adventured alone to the cave's mouth, and tumbled headlong
down the steep slope outside, grunting and growling the while (instead
of whimpering, as his sister would have done), and threatening the whole
South Downs with his displeasure. With never a hint of anything to fill
the place of the much-discussed attribute we call filial instinct in the
young of human kind, the black-and-gray pup conceived the greatest