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treatment.
    All three welcomed Kathleen with delight. She fed them generously, knew Romulus and Remus apart from the first, and gave Tibbles all the affection she wanted. Then Sirius came. Kathleen still fed the cats generously, but that was all Sirius would let her do. The day Sirius found Tibbles sitting on Kathleen’s knee was the first time he barked. Yapping in a furious soprano, he flung himself at Kathleen and managed to get his front paws almost above her kneecaps. Tibbles arose and spat. Her paw shot out, once, twice, three times, before Sirius could remove himself. He was lucky not to lose an eye. But he continued to bark, and Tibbles, very ruffled, escaped onto the sideboard, furious and swearing revenge.
    “Oh Leo!” Kathleen said reproachfully. “That’s not kind. Why shouldn’t she sit on my knee?”
    Sirius did not understand the question, but he was determined that Tibbles should sit on Kathleen’s knee only over his dead body.Kathleen was
his
. The trouble was, he could not trust Kathleen to remember this. Kathleen was kind to all living things. She fed birds, rescued mice from the cats, and tried to grow flowers in a row of cracked cups on her bedroom window sill. Sirius slept in Kathleen’s bedroom, at first in the basket, then on the end of her bed when the basket grew uncomfortably tight. Kathleen would sit up in bed, with a book open in front of her, and talk to him for hours on end. Sirius could not understand what she was saying, but he darkly suspected she was telling him of her abounding love for all creatures.
    One night, when it was spitting with rain, Romulus forgot about Sirius and came in through Kathleen’s bedroom window to spend the night on her bed as he had done before Sirius came. That was the first time Sirius really growled. He leaped up rumbling. Romulus growled too and fled helter-skelter, knocking over Kathleen’s flower-cups as he went.
    “You mustn’t, Leo,” said Kathleen. “He’s
allowed
to. Now look what you’ve made him do!” She was so miserable about her broken flowers that Sirius had to lick her face.
    After that, Sirius knew the cats were putting their heads together to get revenge. He did not care. He knew they were clever, Tibbles especially, but he was not in the least afraid of them. He was at least twice their size by now and still growing. His paws, as Kathleen remarked, were as big as teacups, and he was getting some splendid new teeth. Robin, who was always reading books about dogs, told Kathleen that Leo was certainly half Labrador. But what the other half of him was, neither of them could conjecture. Sirius’s unusuallyglossy coat was a wavy golden-cream, except for the two red-brown patches, foxy red, one over each ear. Then there were those queer green eyes.
    “Red Setter, perhaps?” Robin said doubtfully. “He’s got those feathery bits at the backs of his legs.”
    “Mongrel,” said Basil. “His father was a white rat and his mother was a fox.”
    “Vixen,” Robin corrected him.
    “I thought you’d agree,” said Basil.
    Kathleen, who seldom argued with Basil, said nothing and went away upstairs to make the beds, with Sirius trotting after. “I think you’re really a Griffin,” she said. “Look.” She opened the door of Duffie’s wardrobe so that Sirius could see himself in the long mirror.
    Sirius did not make the mistake of thinking it was another dog. He did not even go around the back of the mirror to see how his reflection got there. He simply sat himself down and looked, which impressed Kathleen very much. “You
are
intelligent!” she said.
    Sirius met his own strange eyes. He had no means of knowing they were unusual, but, all the same, just for a moment, he seemed to be looking at immeasurable distances down inside those eyes. There he saw people and places so different from Duffie’s bedroom that they were almost inconceivable. That was only for an instant. After that, they were only the green eyes of a fat curly