MAROONED 123 



fondly imagined, not only food and shelter, 

 but loving comfort to make her forget her 

 terrors. 



Unutterably still and desolate in the bright 

 sunshine, and under the howling of the 

 wind, the house frightened her. She could 

 not understand the tight-closed shutters, the 

 blind unresponding doors that would no 

 longer open to her anxious appeal. The 

 wind swept her savagely across the naked 

 verandah. Climbing with difficulty to the 

 dining-room window-sill, where so often she 

 had been let in, she clung there a few moments 

 and yowled heart-brokenly. Then, in a sud- 

 den panic, she jumped down and ran to the 

 shed. That, too, was closed. She had never 

 seen the shed doors closed, and could not 

 understand it. Cautiously she crept around 

 the foundations, but those had been honestly 

 and efficiently constructed. There was no 

 such thing as getting in that way. On every 

 side it was nothing but a dead face, dead 

 and forbidding, that the old familiar house 

 confronted her with. 



The cat had always been so coddled and 

 pampered by the children that she had had 

 no need to forage for herself; but, fortu- 

 nately for her now, she had learned to hunt 

 the marsh-mice and grass-sparrows for amuse- 



