"It was pretty bad," he admitted. "The poor little beast turned around and looked at me rather plaintively as though hoping I'd pick him up and be kind to him--he was really just a kitten--and before he knew it a big foot launched out at him and caught his little back"
"Oh!" Gloria's cry was full of anguish.
"It was such a cold night," he continued, perversely, keeping his voice upon a melancholy note. "I guess it expected kindness from somebody, and it got only pain--"
He broke off suddenly--Gloria was sobbing. They had reached home, and when they entered the apartment she threw herself upon the lounge, crying as though he had struck at her very soul.
"Oh, the poor little kitty!" she repeated piteously, "the poor little kitty. So cold--"
"Gloria"
"Don't come near me! Please, don't come near me. You killed the soft little kitty."
Touched, Anthony knelt beside her.
"Dear," he said. "Oh, Gloria, darling. It isn't true. I invented it--every word of it."
But she would not believe him. There had been something in the details he had chosen to describe that made her cry herself asleep that night, for the kitten, for Anthony for herself, for the pain and bitterness and cruelty of all the world.
THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MORALIST
Old Adam died on a midnight of late November with a pious compliment to his God on his thin lips. He, who had been flattered so much, faded out flattering the Omnipotent Abstraction which he fancied he might have angered in the more lascivious moments of his youth. It was announced that he had arranged some sort of an armistice with the deity, the terms of which were not made public, though they were thought to have included a large cash payment. All the newspapers printed his biography, and two of them ran short editorials on his sterling worth, and his part in the drama of industrialism, with which he had grown up. They referred guardedly to the reforms he had sponsored and financed. The memories of Comstock and Cato the Censor were resuscitated and paraded like gaunt ghosts through the columns.
Every newspaper remarked that he was survived by a single grandson, Anthony Comstock Patch, of New York.
The burial took place in the family plot at Tarrytown. Anthony and Gloria rode in the first carriage, too worried to feel grotesque, both trying desperately to glean presage of fortune from the faces of retainers who had been with him at the end.