Her father—hers! And some woman!

It hurt Phoebe cruelly. And the pain was a double one. For she suffered on her own account, imagining a nebulous figure intrude itself between her and the father she loved with such a feeling of absolute possession; and she suffered for her mother. A strange woman in that mother’s place!—in that dear New York nest, at the dainty, round table in the cosy dining-room, in Mother’s corner of the davenport before the open fire of the little drawing-room! The pictures that Manila’s foreboding called up succeeded one another upon her mind’s eye as if it were the screen of a moving-picture theatre.

That was it! She understood all that Manila’s suggestion might mean because she knew step-mothers so well! Yes, she could even remember certain ones in the movies, though not clearly. One fact she was sure of: All step-mothers were cruel!

Miserable as she was, she did not think of seeking her father, of telling him what she feared, and how hurt she was. She felt angry toward him; she resented the way he was acting! Why should he think of another wife? And Mother away out there alone!

Phoebe went up to her room. Facing this new, threatening trouble, she wanted seclusion. But not seclusion to weep. Her eyes were dry, and her head was up. This was a thing that called for action—action! She must do something! She must! And what?

She knew! Standing in the middle of the room, talking to herself under her breath, suddenly it came to her. She would thwart any plan of her father’s to marry again! Did not people always thwart other people’s plans in the moving-pictures? Well, then, she would thwart.

From that hour forward she began to watch her father, secretly, jealously. And she discovered things about him that made her uneasy. Why did he always have that far-away look in his eyes? Why did he keep his lips shut so tight, with that knotting in the jaws that told her how hard his teeth were set together? Why did he walk the dull red carpet of Grandma’s sitting-room so often and so nervously? She had seen “movie” heroes act like that. Were all these signs that Daddy was in love?

She made up her mind to hunt Manila, and ask her just how her father had acted before he married that awful step-mother.

Meanwhile, seeing these things which at least conveyed worry, she came to forget herself in concern over her father. He was unhappy. Yet not about Mother, for it was clear that he did not care for Mother. Then of course he was suffering about someone else. She must try to distract his thoughts to herself. She would redouble her tenderness toward him. She would spend more time with him, kiss him oftener.

During the days that immediately followed, there came into her face and voice and manner a sweet concern toward him. She took to little attentions, such as finding his hat for him when he left the house, or hanging it up when he came in; she lighted his cigarettes; she searched for bits of lint, or small lengths of thread, on his coat. In other words, young and slim-legged as she was,—a baby still in most ways—she yet was assuming toward her father the rÔle of little mother: she was yearning over him. Oh, her Daddy! Her dear, dear Daddy!

After a time, her worry about him lessened somewhat. Few women came to the house, and these were mostly elderly. And her father went out scarcely at all—never in the evenings. If he and she walked together, he often met women whom he knew, and bowed to them, smiling. If he seemed inclined to stop for a chat, Phoebe was quick to urge him on—first of all because she would not let herself be cordial to anyone in the town, and, second, because any woman might be the woman.

But her father never cared to linger when she pulled a little at his arm. Hopefully she had to admit that he did not seem to like any particular person.

Then one day real fear came to her—with a definite object for her jealousy. By chance she and her father stopped at the drug-store down the street—the drug-store to which she loved to hop and skip, the while she nonchalantly bounced the rubber ball. This day when she called for her ice-cream soda, the pretty young woman came forward as usual to wait on her. The pretty young woman seemed to know Phoebe’s father well—very well indeed—almost too well! She smiled across the counter at him: she said, “How are you?” familiarly: she even called him “Jim”.

Phoebe ate her ice-cream soda with a troubled heart. Her father did not eat anything. He talked with the pretty young woman. And the latter urged more ice-cream upon Phoebe when the tall glass was half empty. That aroused Phoebe’s suspicions. She declined a second helping. She understood the purpose behind a second helping! “She wants to get in with me,” Phoebe thought. “That’s because she likes Daddy.”

She left some of her soda in order to get him out of the store and away. And she came to hate the drug-store young woman. Once at the table she made fun of her—of her teeth. Her father said nothing, even seemed not to hear. Grandma said “Darling!” reprovingly. But Phoebe cared nothing about the reproof. There was something at stake—something terribly important. She determined never to go near that drug-store again.

This was more than mere thwarting; already the budding woman was plotting against a rival!

Next, she made a practice, when her father went down town, to go with him as far as that drug-store and see him well past it! And when she had kissed him good-bye at some corner, she returned with no glance toward that counter which had always yielded such generous sodas and sundaes.

One day Phoebe got a fright. The drug-store young woman ran out to them, to intercept them. Doctor Blair, she said, wanted to speak to Phoebe’s father on the drug-store telephone. Phoebe was forced to accompany her father into the place. But she went warily, and she declined to have a soda. She came away with fear. And when she was home once more she wrote her father a note.

“Dear Daddy,” it ran, “I don’t like the girl at the drug-store. You know what I mean. I hate her, I hate her, I hate her. Her grammar is bad. She says don’t instead of doesn’t, like Sophie. Darling, darling Daddy.”

She did not give him the note. It was fortunate that she did not. For the very next day, as she came homeward after seeing her father safe beyond that dangerous corner, here came the object of her hate. The girl was pushing before her a white perambulator. In the carriage was a big rosy baby.

Phoebe would have passed girl and baby without a look. But the former halted her. “Oh, Phoebe, you’ve never seen my little son,” she said.

Phoebe halted, wide of eyes and mouth. Son? That meant marriage—a husband!

“My mother-in-law takes care of him,” explained the drug-store girl. (But of course she was a girl no longer. She was a grown woman—if she was married and had a baby.)

“He’s nice,” said Phoebe; “—like you.”

After that she often went with her father to have ice-cream sodas at the drug-store. And always, in his hearing, she asked after the baby and after the baby’s father, and she rather prided herself on having carried out this particular case of thwarting very well indeed.

But with the young drug-store woman out of the way, she still had no peace of mind. For now there rose up in her day-dreams the vision of a wholly imaginary step-mother. The visionary figure was no longer nebulous. And it was forbidding. Friends of her own age, school-life, even the sympathetic companionship of a woman she could have trusted, would have driven the vision from her thoughts. But in that adult household, where all of her little confidences were given to no one, her morbidity grew until the figure she had imagined came to seem to be alive.

It met her at quick, dim turns in the big lower hall, or on the dark stair-landing. It lurked in her clothes-closet, usurping the place of the Other Thing, which now disappeared. Worst of all, she could imagine the figure in her father’s room!

Curiously enough, it bore no likeness to any of the screen step-mothers Phoebe had seen. This imaginary step-mother was tall, bony, heavy-shouldered and long-armed, with sullen eyes and graying brown hair combed straight back to show a wrinkled brow. What the rest of the face was like, Phoebe never imagined. It was always the brow and the eyes that caught her fleet glance as she hurried by.

That her father would scarcely choose such a woman to be his second wife, somehow never occurred to Phoebe. Had not Botts, poor liquor-soddened, but kindly, soul, acquired Mrs. Botts when unquestionably he did not want her? Such things happened to widowers and divorced men. They were matrimonially helpless. And the vision that Phoebe’s fear called up was of all things formidable, and overbearing, yet silent—with the silence that means power.

Phoebe trembled when she thought of her, and at those certain dim places where the figure met her she felt an awful prickling of the skin.

Her face grew gaunt. Her nose seemed pinched. Her cheeks lost some of their color. So that Uncle Bob talked about a tonic.

But Phoebe did not want a tonic. “Mother doesn’t believe in medicine for children,” she declared. “She’d like it better if I didn’t take any. Wouldn’t she, Daddy?”

Her father looked at her keenly. Then he tucked her under his arm. “I want a talk with my baby,” he declared. They went into Grandma’s room together. And no one followed them. Evidently her father had something very particular to say.

He had. For when he was seated, he drew her to him, and looked up into her face—anxiously! “I’ve got something important to tell you,” he said.

“About Mother?” she asked eagerly.

“N-n-ot exactly.”

As he looked away, plainly embarrassed, a great fear came to her. What Manila had said was coming true—and he was about to confess it! A step-mother!

She longed then to kneel beside him, to beg him to promise her that he would never marry, to tell him she could not bear it. But she held back.

“No, it’s just that I have to take quite a trip,” her father went on.

“West?” she cried. She turned his face. Her eyes were shining.

“To South America—Peru,” he answered.

“Oh.” She backed a little, trying to adjust herself to the news. Once she had seen him go on such trips with little or no concern. Now the thought of his leaving hurt keenly.

“I sha’n’t be gone long,” he said comfortingly. And kissed her.

“Daddy,—while you’re gone—may I go West? To Mother?”

“I’m afraid—not—just right away.”

“But if you go—to tell Mother good-bye.” She was pressing the point. For one thing she wanted to know before he went the truth from him about the divorce.

“I—I sha’n’t be going.”

Her eyes stared into his. “Daddy! You and Mother are divorced!”

“Phoebe!” he gasped, plainly astounded.

“Did you steal me away from Mother?” she demanded.

“Has someone told you that?”

She nodded.

He shook his head. “Oh, my little girl!” he said sadly.

“Daddy! It isn’t true!” Now she knelt, looking up at him, imploring.

“All your life, Phoebe,” he began, “I’ve kept one thought in front of me always: your happiness. I want you to believe that——”

“I do!”

“Whatever I’ve done—even if it doesn’t turn out right—remember that I never considered myself, only my daughter. I brought you here, where you miss your Mother, when I knew your little heart would ache. Oh, Phoebe,”—he bent toward her lovingly—“you used to notice, didn’t you, that in New York, when Daddy left the apartment, he kissed only you good-bye?”

“Yes.”

“And for a long time you haven’t seen Daddy and Mother go anywhere together.”

“Daddy,” she whispered, with a quick look beyond him, lest she be overheard, “don’t you like my mother?”

“Ah, Phoebe!” He shook his head again, sighing. “Ah, if I could only spare my little girl!”

“Daddy!” she cried, her arms suddenly about him. “Dear, dear Daddy!”

“Phoebe, you must try to understand,” he counseled; “and take it all just like the little woman you are. Then you and I will decide what’s best—nobody else. It’s your happiness I’ll think of—just you!”

She felt now that she was to hear the truth. She was ready to confide in him all her fears of a step-mother—even her jealousy; ready to say if, above all things, he wanted her happiness, then he could give her that by putting no new wife in her mother’s place.

But her father got no further with what he plainly intended to say to her. And Phoebe was not able to open her young heart to him. For their conference was broken in upon by Sophie, who entered, smiling, telegram in hand.

“Boy wants a’ answer, Mr. Jim,” she announced.

Phoebe’s father took the yellow envelope with a trace of irritation at being interrupted.

“Oh, Daddy, is it from Mother?” Phoebe questioned.

He did not answer. The telegram was open in his hand. He was reading it, and his hand was shaking.

“Wait!” he bade, as Sophie turned to go.

“Is it?—Oh, Daddy!” pleaded Phoebe. She saw with alarm that his face had gone suddenly white.

He rose, crushing the wire and thrusting it into a pocket “Where is my mother?” he asked the girl.

“In the dinin’-room.”

In obedience to his gesture, Sophie went out. He turned to Phoebe. “I must see Uncle Bob,” he said quietly. Then, leaning to lift her to her feet, “And you go into the garden for a little while, till Daddy wants you.” He kissed her.

Phoebe asked no other question. She was used to mystery, to being bewildered. But she knew something had happened—something out of the ordinary. It was no business telegram that could drive the color from her father’s face and set his fingers to trembling. As she walked over the lawn she reflected that, after all, everyday life very closely resembled the “movies”.