Stealing downstairs a quarter of an hour later, I beheld Eve seated at the kitchen table consuming food. No one else was in sight except a large gray cat folded up comfortably by the stove.
“Where is she?” I whispered, poking my head cautiously through the doorway.
“Gone to market,” Eve said, resugaring her oatmeal. “I told her you had a basketball wrist and the doctor said you needed lots of sleep.”
“Oh, Eve!” I ventured toward the stove and helped myself to oatmeal. The gray cat rose and began twining himself about my feet. “I didn’t see any cat last night,” I remarked.
“He comes and goes, Aunt Cal told me. I asked her, by the way, if I might call her that and she said she didn’t mind.”
Eve continued to talk as I ate. “I told her about the suitcases getting mixed,” she remarked presently.
“You did!” I regarded her admiringly. I had been worrying about this ever since I woke up, wondering how I was going to make my mistake sound plausible. “What did she say?” I demanded anxiously.
Eve grinned. “Oh, just that she could not possibly understand such carelessness and not knowing one’s own baggage and so forth and so on.”
I nodded gloomily. I was off to a bad start with Aunt Cal, there was no doubt of that. First this suitcase business and then oversleeping.
“She left word,” Eve continued, “that in case you rose in time, you were to take the suitcase over to the bus station and make inquiries of the driver when the morning bus gets in.”