Unlike him, she retained a kind of hope. Hope is an instinct only the reasoning human mind can kill. An animal never knows despair. Watching her wounded progress he had a sense that this had happened daily—perhaps for weeks; he was watching one of the well-rehearsed effects of the new day, like bird-song in happier regions. She dragged herself up to the veranda door and began to scratch with one paw, lying oddly spreadeagled. Her nose was down to a crack: she seemed to be breathing in the unused air of empty rooms; then she whined impatiently, and once her tail beat as if she heard something
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