His friend had arranged to travel with him, that morning, from London
to the port at which the yacht was waiting for them. They were hardly
intimate enough to trust each other unreservedly with secrets. The
customary apology for breaking an engagement was the alternative that
remained. With the paper on his desk and with the words on his mind, he
was yet in such a strange state of indecision that he hesitated to
write the letter!

His morbidly-sensitive nerves were sadly shaken. Even the familiar
record of the half-hour by the hall clock startled him. The stroke of
the bell was succeeded by a mild and mournful sound outside the
door--the mewing of a cat.

He rose, without any appearance of surprise, and opened the door.

With grace and dignity entered a small black female cat; exhibiting, by
way of variety of colour, a melancholy triangular patch of white over
the lower part of her face, and four brilliantly clean white paws. Ovid
went back to his desk. As soon as he was in his chair again, the cat
jumped on his shoulder, and sat there purring in his ear. This was the
place she occupied, whenever her master was writing alone. Passing one
day through a suburban neighbourhood, on his round of visits, the young
surgeon had been attracted by a crowd in a by-street. He had rescued
his present companion from starvation in a locked-up house, the
barbarous inhabitants of which had gone away for a holiday, and had
forgotten the cat. When Ovid took the poor creature home with him in
his carriage, popular feeling decided that the unknown gentleman was "a
rum 'un." From that moment, this fortunate little member of a
brutally-slandered race attached herself to her new friend, and to that