The case of the careless kitten [antikvár]

The Kitten's eyes, weaving back and forth, followed the ball of crumpled paper that Helen Kendal was waving high above the arm of the chair. The kitten was named Amber Eyes because of those yellow eyes. Helen liked to watch them. Their black pupils were always changing, narrowing to ominous slits, widening to opaque pools of onyx. Those black and amber eyes had an almost hypnotic effect on Helen. After she had watched them a little while her thoughts seemed to slip. She would forget the near things, like today, and this room, and the kitten; she could even forget about Jerry Templar and Aunt Matilda's eccentric domineerings, and find herself suddenly thinking about things that were far away or long ago. It was one of the long-a.go things this time. Years and years ago. When Helen Kendal was ten, and there was another kitten, a grey-and-white one, up on the roof. So high up that it was afraid to come down. And a tall man with kind grey eyes had fetched a long ladder and was standing up at the wobbly tip of it, patiently coaxing the kitten towards his out-stretched hand. Uncle Franklin. Helen was thinking about him now as she had thought about him then. Not as she had learned to think about him afterwards, from other people. Not as Aunt Matilda's runaway husband, not as Franklin Shore, the Missing Banker, in the big headlines, not as the man who had inexplicably thrown away success and wealth and power and family and life-long friends, to lose himself, moneyless, among strangers. Helen was thinking of him, now, only as the Uncle Franklin who had risked his life to rescue a scared kitten for a sorrowful little girl, as the only father whom that little girl had ever known, a gentle, understanding, friendly father, remembered, after all these years, with a love that knew and would keep on knowing, against all seeming proofs to the contrary, that it had been returned.