"Intuition," I answered.

He pouted his under lip above the upper one, with a dubious
acquiescence. "Inference, I call it," he retorted. "All woman's
so-called intuition is, in fact, just rapid and half-unconscious
inference."

He was so full of the subject, however, and so utterly carried away by
his scientific ardour, that I regret to say he gave a strong dose of
lethodyne at once to each of the matron's petted and pampered Persian
cats, which lounged about her room and were the delight of the
convalescents. They were two peculiarly lazy sultanas of cats--mere
jewels of the harem--Oriental beauties that loved to bask in the sun
or curl themselves up on the rug before the fire and dawdle away their
lives in congenial idleness. Strange to say, Hilda's prophecy came true.
Zuleika settled herself down comfortably in the Professor's easy chair
and fell into a sound sleep from which there was no awaking; while
Roxana met fate on the tiger-skin she loved, coiled up in a circle,
and passed from this life of dreams, without knowing it, into one
where dreaming is not. Sebastian noted the facts with a quiet gleam of
satisfaction in his watchful eye, and explained afterwards, with curt
glibness to the angry matron, that her favourites had been "canonised
in the roll of science, as painless martyrs to the advancement of
physiology."

The weasels, on the other hand, with an equal dose, woke up after six
hours as lively as crickets. It was clear that carnivorous tastes were
not the whole solution, for Roxana was famed as a notable mouser.

"Your principle?" Sebastian asked our sibyl, in his brief, quick way.