To Phœbe, Uncle Bob took on a new and intense interest. Heretofore, he had been just Uncle Bob, stout and jolly and loving, with certain unknown duties at the Court House, and his various homely pastimes at home, such as gardening and puttering about the stable, and hunting worms. But now all at once he seemed different. And Phœbe forgot his stoutness and his baldness in remembering that he was the adoring, yet unhappy, lover. And just as she had watched her father’s face for signs of suffering, she now watched this uncle, discovering sadness in his smiling blue eyes, and yearning even in his whistled tunes as he hammered away at the chicken-coop.
“He loves Miss Ruth,” she pondered. She was doubly tender to him, knowing his secret. And just as she had vowed to thwart any plan of her father’s to marry a second wife, she now gave time to a plot that would bring Miss Ruth to Grandma’s.
Sophie discouraged the idea. “You can’t make Miss Ruth love your Uncle if she don’t,” she asserted. “And—she don’t.”
“I’m going to pray about it,” resolved Phœbe, stoutly.
It meant a new ending to her bedside devotions. First there was that general plea to her Maker, which, she felt, kept her right in her own conscience and in the sight of her fellow-beings. Next came her whispered appeal to her mother, bringing that dear presence poignantly near. The final prayer was as simple as it was heartfelt: “Oh, God, please help Miss Ruth to love my Uncle Bob!”
Yet she never dared broach the matter to her uncle. Other things they discussed most confidentially; for instance, Uncle John.
“When I get educated,” Phœbe wanted to know, “like Uncle John is, will I talk to people like he does, and make them sleepy?”
Uncle Bob roared with laughter, and slapped his knee. “That’s a good one!” he cried. “And down at the Court House, sometimes when I talk a good deal I can put a lawyer to sleep.”
“Lawyers are not nice people,” Phœbe declared. “At least they’re never very nice on the screen.”
She asked him quite frankly about her program of work. “Public school is out, and so is Miss Simpson’s,” she reminded him; “and here I am at lessons every morning.”