Timmy did not answer at once, but at last he said in a queer, muffled voice:  “If I were to tell Dr. O’Farrell what I did, do you think it would make any difference?  Do you think that he’d let Josephine go on being alive?”

“No,” his mother answered, sadly, “I don’t think it would make any difference.”

“I thought by what the doctor said at first that they were going to take Josephine somewhere to see if she was really mad,” said Timmy in a choking voice, “just as they did to Captain Berner’s dog last year.”

Janet Tosswill got up from her little boy’s bed.  She lit a candle.  Poor Timmy!  She had never seen the boy looking as he was looking now; he seemed utterly spent with misery.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, my dear.  I’ll speak to Dr. O’Farrell myself in the morning, and I’ll ask him whether something can’t be done in the way of a reprieve.  I’ll tell him we don’t mind paying for Josephine to be sent away for a bit to a vet.”

Hope, ecstatic hope, flashed into Timmy’s tear-stained face.  “You mean to a man like Trotman?”

“Yes, that’s what I do mean.  But I mustn’t raise false hopes.  I fear Dr. O’Farrell has made up his mind; he promised Mrs. Crofton the cat should be shot.  Still, I’ll do my very best.”

Timmy put his skinny arms round his mother’s neck.

“I’m glad you’re my mother, Mum,” he muttered, “and not my step-mother.”

She smiled for the first time.  “That’s rather a double-edged compliment, if I may say so!  But I suppose it’s true that I would do a good deal more for you than I would for any of the others.”

“I didn’t mean that,” exclaimed Timmy, shocked.  “I only meant that I wouldn’t love you as well.  I don’t mean ever to be a step-father—­I shall start a lot of boys and girls of my own.”

“All right,” she said soothingly, “I’m sure you will.  Lie down now, and try to go to sleep.”  She hoped with all her heart that the boy would sleep late the next morning, as he very often did when tired out, and that the execution, if execution there must be, would be over by the time he woke.

She bent down, tucked him up, kissed him, blew out the candle, and then went quickly out of the room.

* * * * *

As soon as his mother had shut the door, Timmy sat up in bed, and then he gave a smothered cry.  It was as if he had seen flash out into the darkness his beloved cat’s wistful face, her beautiful, big, china-blue eyes, gazing confidently at him, as if to say, “You’ll save me, Master, won’t you?”

He listened intently for a few minutes, then he slipped down and felt his way to the door.  He opened it; but there came no sound from the sleeping house.  Closing the door very, very softly, he lit his candle and rapidly dressed himself in his day clothes, finally putting on a thick pair of walking shoes, and over them goloshes.  Timmy hated goloshes, and never wore them if he could help it, but he had read in some detective story that they deadened sound.