And he sat on a potboy's stool in a smoking kitchen at an inn with his knees up, and wanted nothing on earth but for somebody to say: don't go yet.She had said three things to him in the hour. He had answered all three, and each answer had been one word long, and he had heard each one come out and been ashamed of it.The cat came in at half past nine.The potboy, Jacky—the boy who carried the pots and was sent for everything—had left the yard door on the latch for the ash-bucket, and the door moved, and she came round it. She was black all over, and she came in the way she went everywhere, without any hurry, and she crossed the flagstones of the kitchen as though she had crossed them every night of her life, and she had never crossed them in her life. She had never in ten years gone further from the forge fire than the trough in the yard.Abigail Tinsley stood at the range with a spoon in her hand and watched her come. The green coat hung on the back of the chair by the range, where it hung every night to dry. The cat looked up at it for a while. Then she got up onto the chair, and onto the coat, and turned round once, and lay down on it, and shut her eyes, and was asleep."Well," said Abigail, very low, to the cat, with the spoon still in her hand. "Well, Sheba. You've come a long way for a Tuesday."The duke did not hear it. He was looking at his own hands. Then he looked at the cat. He did not say anything to Abigail. He got up off the stool—it took some time; there was a good deal of him—and looked at the cat asleep on his coat, and then, because it was the only thing he knew how to do, he sat down on the floor beside the chair with his back to the wall and his legs out across the flagstones, and talked to her."You're the forge cat," he said. "You had my coat this morning. I know. I saw you. You had Brigstock's for a year and you gave him up for a frieze coat that smells of bacon, and he laughed, and he will go on laughing about it till Easter."The cat did not move."I'd have you know I'm no use to you. I don't shoe. I can't cook. I am no use to anybody who cannot be shod or fed. That's the whole of me. You've made a poor exchange."