She did not know what Mrs. Carringford had said to daddy, nor how much he had been influenced by that wise woman's observations regarding this very matter. So, as the days went by, Janice continued to fear the worst.
For the very worst that could happen, Janice thought, was for her to be separated from her father and from her home. When the possibility of his having to go to Mexico was first talked about, the thought of their separation had made a very deep impression on the girl's mind. She had never recovered—how could she? —from the going away of her mother. If her father went out of her life too, it seemed to Janice as though she would be an orphan indeed.
So, without knowing anything personally about her Aunt Almira or Uncle Jason or Marty, her cousin, the girl felt that their association could in no way replace that of daddy.
"I just wish something would happen so that I couldn't go to
Poketown," was repeated over and over in her thought.
"Perhaps that is wicked," Janice told herself. "But wicked, or not, it does seem as though it would just kill me to leave home."
After Mrs. Carringford had finished cleaning house, the home seemed so much better and brighter that Janice loved it more than ever. She did not want to leave Eight Hundred and Forty-five Knight Street, even for a day.
"I don't care if Arlo Junior does toll cats into our back kitchen and we entertain dancing bears and that half-crazy Delia and folks like Mrs. Watkins or Olga Cedarstrom," she said to daddy. "This is just the nicest house in all the world. Don't you think so yourself, Daddy?"
"I never expect to have so much happiness in another house as I have had in this one, my dear," Mr. Day said. "And we will hope for more happiness here in the future. But my little girl must not try to do everything. It is all right to be a homemaker; but you must not try to do it all yourself. We must find somebody to help, regularly."
Secretly Janice was urging Mrs. Carringford to come every day to the house and keep it in that "neat as a new pin" condition in which the sweet-natured woman had left it when the extra cleaning was finished.
"But my dear child, how will my own house get along without me?
Amy cannot do it all, even if it is vacation-time."