Her voice trailed off into nothingness. And without another word, I climbed into bed and pulled the covers close about me.
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WHEN I opened my eyes to a roomful of sunlight and sea breezes, Eve was gone. My watch had stopped. What with one thing and another, I had forgotten to wind it. But I knew by the look of things that the morning would never see seven o'clock again!
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."
"What time will that be?" As I spoke, I glanced at the clock and was horrified to see that it was long past eight.
"About nine. It only makes two trips a day so we'd better be starting soon or we'll be late."
Fishers Haven in the morning light was somewhat more prosaic than in the golden glow of the evening before. Just a straggling little village with a sprinkling of comfortable homes and a half dozen stores or so, it made no pretensions to the importance of a seaside resort. But Eve did not seem to find it prosaic. She was interested in everything from the list of sundaes in the drug store window to the funny little cupola-like balconies on top of some of the older houses, built so that the wives of fishermen could look out to sea and watch for the return of their men.