Yet for all his gaiety, Phœbe sensed that there was something about it all which she did not understand. For one thing, why did her mother not write to her?
“Has Mother written you?” she asked her father.
“Yes.” But though he searched his pockets and the desk, he failed to locate the letter. Also he was not able to remember much that the letter contained.
“Of course,” conceded Phœbe, “Mother isn’t a very good letter-writer. Whenever you were away, she’d say, ‘You write to Daddy.’ And I would. Darling Mother! She never liked to sit down and go at it. She just seems to hate ink.”
“That’s why she wires,” declared Phœbe’s father. “It’s easy to get off a telegram.—Oh, well.”
But Phœbe kept on puzzling over it all. When the telegrams stopped, her father admitted that letters kept on arriving. But he never showed any of them to Phœbe, or read to her from them. He explained that they were about very private matters. “What?” Phœbe asked herself.
Yes, there was something about all this telegraphing and letter-writing which she did not understand.
CHAPTER IV
There was something else which Phœbe did not understand. Walking, mittened and warmly clad, over the snow-crusted half-acre of Grandma’s garden, she gave herself up to conjecture. Or in the sitting-room, with Grandma seated nearby, sewing, she puzzled her small head. And when she drove with Uncle Bob into the country, through lanes of naked trees that edged bare fields, she studied his big, good-natured face and wished that she might open her heart and ask him all about it.
That something else which she did not understand was this: a strict watch was being kept upon her—almost as if in fear!