“He is named,” said the girl, still icily, “for a statesman my parents admired.  My brother says our Persian’s hair is just the same color as Simon Cameron’s used to be.  That’s why we named him that.  You’ll notice the cat has the beautifullest silvery gray hair—­”

“Prematurely gray, I’m sure,” put in Brice, civilly.

She looked at him, in doubt.  But his face was grave.  And she turned to the task of coaxing the indignant Simon Cameron from his tree-refuge.

“Simon Cameron always walks around the grounds with me, at sunset,” she explained, in intervals of cajoling the grumpy mass of fluff to descend.  “And he ran ahead of me, to-day, to the edge of the path.  That must have been when Bobby caught sight of him...”

“Come, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!” she coaxed.  “Do be a good little cat, and come down.  See, the dog can’t get at you, now.  He’s being held.  Come!”

The allurement of his mistress’s voice produced no stirring effect on the temperamental Simon Cameron.  Beyond leaving the crotch and edging mincingly downward, a yard or so, the Persian refused to obey the crooning summons.  Plastered flat against the tree trunk, some nine feet above the ground, he miaued dolefully.

“Hold Bobby’s collar,” suggested Brice, “and I think I can get the prematurely grizzled catling to earth.”

The girl came over to where man and dog stood, and took Bobby Burns by the collar.  Brice crossed to the tree and looked upward at the yowling Simon Cameron.

“Hello, you good little cat!” he hailed, cooingly.  “Cats always like to be called ‘good,’ you know.  All of us are flattered when we’re praised for something we aren’t.  A dog doesn’t care much about being called ‘good.’  Because he knows he is.  But a cat...”

As he talked, Gavin scratched gratingly on the tree trunk, and gazed up in ostentatious admiration at the coy Simon Cameron.  The Persian, like all his kind, was foolishly open to admiration.  Brice’s look, his crooning voice, his entertaining fashion of scratching the tree for the cat’s amusement all these proved a genuine lure.  Down the tree started Simon Cameron, moving backward, and halting coquettishly at every few inches.

Gavin reached up and lifted the fluffy creature from the trunk, cradling him in expert manner in the crook of one arm.  Simon Cameron forgot his fear and purred loudly, rubbing his snub-nose face against his captor’s sleeve.

“Don’t feel too much flattered,” adjured the girl.  “He’s like that, with all strangers.  As soon as he has known most people a day or two, he’ll have nothing to do with them.”

“I know,” assented Gavin.  “That’s a trick of Persian cats.  They have an inordinate interest in every one except the people they know.  Their idea of heaven is to be admired by a million strangers at a time.  If I’d had any tobacco-reek on me, Simon Cameron wouldn’t have let me hold him as long as this.  Persian’s hate tobacco.”