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grades or shrewd maneuvering found themselves favorites of Madame Mullein were allowed to stroke the cat’s head on certain occasions: but of course naughty noisy rebellious Leah had never been a favorite. Ah, that bitch Mullein! Leah had wished the woman dead, and indeed she was now dead, and now Leah had a cat of her own, a creature quite simply the most beautiful animal she had ever seen. (And of course Leah had adored her horses, especially as a young girl; and she had had, from the age of twelve until nearly nineteen, when she became engaged to Gideon Bellefleur, a most unusual pet—a large satiny-black spider of which she was inordinately, and perversely, fond; and she’d had a sentimental attachment to numerous Bellefleur hounds, and the usual household cats and kittens: but none of these creatures was to mean as much to her as Mahalaleel.)
    “Yes, aren’t you a beauty, aren’t you a gift,” Leah murmured, hardly able to tear her eyes away from Mahalaleel, who was now washing his paws with quick, deft strokes of his pink tongue, oblivious of her. There was something mesmerizing about his fur: roseate, shining, silky and light as milkweed fluff, and yet astonishingly thick; and how endlessly fascinating, how haunting, the pattern—which she could not quite discern—made by those thousands of hairs, each with its own subtle color. From a distance of some feet Mahalaleel looked one color, a frosty pinkish-gray; closer up he looked another shade, laced with bronze. From one angle he appeared to be eerily transparent, as the morning sunshine penetrated his fine, delicate, rather large ears; from another angle, where his long, thick tail and his somewhat outsized feet with their pink-gray pads were in evidence, he looked massive—a creature whose considerable bulk was dense with muscle, though disguised by deceptively pretty, even frivolous fur light as bird’s down. But how magnificent! Leah stared and stared.
    Hugging her knees, her disheveled braid lying over her right shoulder, she stared at the beast she had named Mahalaleel. He was an omen, quite clearly: an omen of great good fortune. How languidly he washed himself, oblivious of her. . . . Half-consciously she fingered the scratches he had made the night before in his terror. They still hurt, and had now begun to itch. Her fingertips took note, with a curious bemused detachment, of the fine, hard, hairlike ridges of coagulated blood on her forearms, and shoulders, and low on her right cheek, and even on her right breast: ah, the strange pleasure of seeking out those welts, scratching them lightly, teasingly !—the strange pleasure of encountering such very interesting and unexpected textures on her own flesh, where, the previous day, there had been only smooth unmarked skin. And though this beautiful creature had hurt her he had behaved without knowing what he did, and was consequently innocent.
    “Mahalaleel? Why have you come to us?” Leah whispered.
    The cat continued to wash his paws, and then his ears, and then he stretched and yawned—showing magnificent teeth, ivory-white, so sharp and strong that Leah drew in her breath. Suppose he should suddenly attack her . . . ? Suppose he should sink those teeth, sizable as an ocelot’s, into her flesh? She leaned forward to pet him again, moving cautiously. With an aristocrat’s natural disdain he drew away slightly, and then allowed her to stroke his head. “My beauty, my Mahalaleel,” she said.
     
    WHEN THE REST of the household saw Mahalaleel they were, of course, astonished. That skinny ratlike creature of the night before, that ugly doomed little beast—! Transformed into this.
    Grandfather Noel spoke for them all by stammering, “But it doesn’t—it doesn’t seem believable —”
    Mahalaleel stretched and turned away, curling into a massive ball on the hearth, ignoring them.
    From that day onward the uncanny creature Mahalaleel lived with the Bellefleurs; indeed, he had the run of the