“He—­he isn’t dead,” gasped Anne, sitting blankly down on the kitchen doorstep.

“He must be,” said Phil incredulously.

Another tiny mew proved that he wasn’t.  The two girls stared at each other.

“What will we do?” questioned Anne.

“Why in the world don’t you come?” demanded Stella, appearing in the doorway.  “We’ve got the grave ready.  ’What silent still and silent all?’” she quoted teasingly.

“’Oh, no, the voices of the dead Sound like the distant torrent’s fall,’” promptly counter-quoted Anne, pointing solemnly to the box.

A burst of laughter broke the tension.

“We must leave him here till morning,” said Phil, replacing the stone.  “He hasn’t mewed for five minutes.  Perhaps the mews we heard were his dying groan.  Or perhaps we merely imagined them, under the strain of our guilty consciences.”

But, when the box was lifted in the morning, Rusty bounded at one gay leap to Anne’s shoulder where he began to lick her face affectionately.  Never was there a cat more decidedly alive.

“Here’s a knot hole in the box,” groaned Phil.  “I never saw it.  That’s why he didn’t die.  Now, we’ve got to do it all over again.”

“No, we haven’t,” declared Anne suddenly.  “Rusty isn’t going to be killed again.  He’s my cat—­and you’ve just got to make the best of it.”

“Oh, well, if you’ll settle with Aunt Jimsie and the Sarah-cat,” said Stella, with the air of one washing her hands of the whole affair.

From that time Rusty was one of the family.  He slept o’nights on the scrubbing cushion in the back porch and lived on the fat of the land.  By the time Aunt Jamesina came he was plump and glossy and tolerably respectable.  But, like Kipling’s cat, he “walked by himself.”  His paw was against every cat, and every cat’s paw against him.  One by one he vanquished the aristocratic felines of Spofford Avenue.  As for human beings, he loved Anne and Anne alone.  Nobody else even dared stroke him.  An angry spit and something that sounded much like very improper language greeted any one who did.

“The airs that cat puts on are perfectly intolerable,” declared Stella.

“Him was a nice old pussens, him was,” vowed Anne, cuddling her pet defiantly.

“Well, I don’t know how he and the Sarah-cat will ever make out to live together,” said Stella pesimistically.  “Cat-fights in the orchard o’nights are bad enough.  But cat-fights here in the livingroom are unthinkable.”  In due time Aunt Jamesina arrived.  Anne and Priscilla and Phil had awaited her advent rather dubiously; but when Aunt Jamesina was enthroned in the rocking chair before the open fire they figuratively bowed down and worshipped her.

Aunt Jamesina was a tiny old woman with a little, softly-triangular face, and large, soft blue eyes that were alight with unquenchable youth, and as full of hopes as a girl’s.  She had pink cheeks and snow-white hair which she wore in quaint little puffs over her ears.