Some people never know when they are well off.  It is a complaint which afflicts cats, you may have noticed, and gets them into much trouble that their contemptuous temper might otherwise leave them free from.  The silver tabby would have done better if she had remained asleep upon Miss Somebody’s arm-chair, instead of squatting, still as marble, out in a damp field on a damp night, watching a rabbits’ “stop”—­which is vernacular for a bunnies’ nursery—­and thinking how nice raw, pink baby-rabbit would taste if she got the chance to sample it.  She didn’t.  At least, she hadn’t for an hour and a half; but, then, what’s an hour and a half to a cat?  Apparently the silver tabby could wait, just like that, utterly inert, till the crack of doom—­or dawn.

Mind you, she was not alone.  She had company.  One always has in the wild at night, or nearly always.  You couldn’t see that company, but I don’t know whether the silver tabby could.  Who can tell how much a cat sees, anyway?  Nor do I think the company could see her, she being still, and wild eyes not being good at picking out the still form.  Neither could they hear her, for she said nothing; neither did she purr.  They must have smelt her, though.  Anyway, she seemed to be a little island in the mist—­the faint, faint, ethereal dew-mist—­where nobody walked.  You could hear them—­a rustle here, a squeak there, a thud somewhere else, a displaced leaf, a cracked twig—­this only once—­a drumming, a patter, a sniff, a snuffle, a sigh; but they all passed by on the other side, so to say, and gave the silver tabby room to think.  Apparently cats are not considered good company in the wild; lonely creatures, they are best left alone.

No mother-rabbit came to the “stop”—­which the cat knew to be there—­to feed her babies, which the cat, thanks to her nose, knew to be there, too.  No baby-rabbits came out to be fed—­or to feed the cat either.  “Stops” are secrets, kept from the rest of rabbitdom by the wise mothers, and, they hope, from other inquisitive people also.  The little short holes in the middle of the field are plugged up by the old does with grass and fur when they are away, which is pretty often.

Then the silver tabby heard a thump come out of the night—­a thud, hollow, resounding, and noticeable.  It was repeated after an interval, and again repeated.  There was a certain note of insistence about it—­like a signal.  And if the cat had been a wild creature she would have thrown up the sponge, or gone away, and returned secretly later, or, anyway, not persisted in crouching there; for those thuds were a signal, and they meant that the game was up.  In other words, some wily old mother circling the approach, or some wandering back-eddy of wind, had given the cat away; she had been scented, and rabbit after rabbit, squatting invisible in the night, was thumping the ground with its feet to say so and warn all off whom it might concern.  The silver tabby, however, neither wild nor satisfied to be tame, did not know.  She sat on, and in doing so wondered, perhaps, at the scarcity of rabbits thereabouts.