[CHAPTER XVII—HENRIETTA IS WORRIED]
“I used to think I liked to get letters,” said Henrietta, walking up and down the long veranda, arm in arm with Hazel Benton and Jean, “but now I don’t. My sweet old grandmother doesn’t say much but I can see that she’s worried to death because she doesn’t hear from my father—she always asks if I’ve heard. We haven’t either of us had a word since last June. Of course, often it is two or three months between letters because he gets into such unget-at-able places; and when there, gets so interested in what he is doing that he doesn’t realize how the time is getting away, and quite often there are no postoffices that he can possibly reach. But he does try to write often enough to keep us from worrying. Then there are some people in England who look after his money and other business matters for him. Well, grandmother says they haven’t heard from him; and she thought perhaps I’d brought my last letter from him with me—it had the name of a place that he might have gone to in it. But I left it in Lakeville—I think I can tell her just where to look for it—in one of those lovely little boxes that he sent me from India.”
“It must be lovely,” breathed Hazel, “to get presents from India.”
“It is—when I’m getting them. But now I don’t like any of Grandmother’s letters. I just hate to open them. She’s trying not to frighten me and at the same time she’s just scaring me to pieces. I didn’t think much about it before I left home last fall, but when I didn’t get a single thing from him at Christmas time (he always sends me things for Christmas) I was sure there was something wrong. And then, of course, I began to think of all the things that might happen to a man that looks at a map and then plunges right into it, whether it’s wet or dry, the way Daddy does. And goodness! It’s a wonder there’s a man left on this earth. I can imagine such awful things. I wake up in the night and worry for hours.”
“What does your father do for a living?” asked Hazel.
“He doesn’t do anything for a living,” explained Henrietta, who for some time had been wearing a worried expression that was new to her. “He just does what he does because he’s perfectly crazy about digging up things—like tombs and buried cities and old marble statues. He’d rather find the nick that came out of a prehistoric platter than to own a brand new set of dishes.”
“He must be quite handy with a shovel by this time,” said Hazel.
“Oh, he doesn’t do the digging himself,” explained Henrietta. “He hires folks—natives mostly. They do the actual digging but he is always right there to make sure that they work carefully. Otherwise they’d smash valuable finds and that would be worse than not digging them up at all. He knows a wonderful lot about pottery and old metals and marbles and—just loads of things. He’s an archæologist.”
“No wonder you were able to spell the whole school down on that word, yesterday,” said Hazel. “It must be wonderful to have a father like that.”
“It would be,” returned Henrietta, soberly, “if he didn’t have to take such dreadful risks.”