“But what could it have been?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said Thaddeus, “unless it was a stray cat in the house. The sweeping sound may have been caused by a cat scratching its collar—or purring—or—or—something. At any rate, things appear to be all right, my dear, so let’s go to sleep.”
Thaddeus’s assumed confidence in the rightness of everything, rather than his explanations, was convincing to Mrs. Perkins, and in a very short while she was sleeping the sleep of the just and serene; but to Thaddeus’s eye there came no more sleep that night, and when morning came he rose unrefreshed. There were two problems confronting him. The first was to solve the mystery of the swept library floor; the second was to do this without arousing his wife’s suspicions that anything was wrong. To do the first he deemed it necessary to remain at home that day, which was easy, for Thaddeus was more or less independent of office-work.
“I’m glad you’re not going down,” said Mrs. Perkins, when he announced his intention of remaining at home. “You will be able to make up for your loss of sleep last night.”
“Yes,” said Thaddeus. “It’s the only thing I can do, I’m so played out.”
Breakfast passed off pleasantly in spite of a great drawback—the steak was burned almost to a crisp, and the fried potatoes were like chips of wood.
“Margaret seems to be unfamiliar with the art of cooking this morning,” said Thaddeus.
“So it would seem,” said Bessie. “This steak is horrible.”
“The worst part of it is,” said Thaddeus, “she has erred on the wrong side. If the steak were underdone it wouldn’t be so bad. Isn’t it a pity Edison can’t invent a machine to rarefy an overdone steak?”
“That would be a fine idea,” smiled Bessie. “And to take a Saratoga chip and make it less like a chip off a granite block.”