“You like me, don’t you, dear?” Miss Ruth returned happily. It was early morning, and Phœbe had just wakened. Already the room was lightening with the dawn. Miss Ruth leaned down and cupped Phœbe’s cheek in the palm of a hand. “And you’re like your father,” she added with a tender smile.
Soon there came a time when Phœbe slept through the nights without waking, when watchers were no longer needed beside her bed. She did not understand how it was, but she had come to feel two things: First, it did not seem true that her mother was dead, and having had no letters from her mother since leaving New York, there was not even the cutting off of messages to bring home to Phœbe her loss; second, her mother’s death settled finally a question that had vexed Phœbe sorely, the troublesome question of what was going to happen once the divorce was granted. Now Phœbe knew. She had only Daddy! She would go with Daddy.
And as this fact was borne in upon her, she remembered the matter that Manila had broached. She recollected, too, the decision she herself had made—to thwart. “And I must get at it,” she declared. “Because now, with Mother gone it’s likely——”
She wrote her father. From Nevada he had gone on directly southward, and his address was such a very strange one that Phœbe had her Uncle Bob direct her envelope. But no one saw what she wrote. Though what she wrote was not what she had fully intended to say. At first she had determined to tell him frankly that she could never, never bear to have a step-mother, who would hate her, and beat her with part of a tug, and turn her father against her. She ended by sending him four cheerful, newsy pages; only at the end did she allow herself to touch remotely upon what was uppermost in her mind.
“Darling Daddy,” ran her final paragraph, “you don’t like anybody but me, do you? Oh, dear Daddy, say you don’t.”
When the letter was gone (she posted it herself), she realized that now, with Mother dead, it would be harder than ever for her if her father were to marry a second time. She saw that she must have counsel from someone. And who knew more about the whole thing than Manila? She determined to see Manila.
During those first weeks following Phœbe’s arrival from New York, how anxious the family had been that she should meet and talk to no one. But now, as during Phœbe’s attendance at Miss Simpson’s, her uncles and her grandmother were more than anxious that she should have company—and plenty of it, so that her thoughts would not dwell too much upon her loss.
“Aren’t there some little girls that you’d like to have come?” Grandma often wanted to know.
This gave Phœbe her opportunity! “I’d like to see Manila,” she announced one day.
And so it came about that Manila paid Phœbe a second visit, and the two went out to the summerhouse, taking along Phœbe’s old doll, and Phœbe told Manila all about Mother, and wept, her head on Manila’s knee, and confessed her fears and her intention to thwart.