The time came at last, conveyed to him as surely as by a punctual
clock, and he rose noiselessly to his feet. Then again he paused, and
stretched first one strong foreleg and then the other to its furthest
reach, shooting again his claws, conscious with a faint sense of
well-being of those tightly-strung muscles rippling beneath his loose
striped skin. They would be in action presently. And, as he did so,
there looked over the parapet six feet above him, at the top of the
trellis up which presently he would ascend, another resolute little
head and blunt-spired cars, and a soft indescribable voice spoke a
gentle insult. It was his friend ... and, he knew well enough, on some
high ridge in the background squatted a young female beauty, with
flattened ears and waving tail, awaiting the caresses of the victor.
As he saw the head above him, to human eyes a shapeless silhouette, to
his eyes a grey-penciled picture perfect in all its details, he paused
in his stretching. Then he sat back, arranged his tail, and lifted his
head to answer. The cry that came from him, not yet _fortissimo_,
sounded in human ears beneath no more than a soft broken-hearted wail,
but to him who sat above it surpassed in insolence even his own
carefully modulated offensiveness.
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