After her father had gone to the hospital Kitty couldn’t put him from her mind. She decided she must do something to lift him out of his depression. Later when she was in the kitchen helping to fix Billy’s breakfast plate, she remarked to Jane that she was afraid her father wasn’t very well.
“Reckon he worried ’bout somepen, Miss Kit?”
“Las’ night atter us all in bed I hear him pacin’ back an’ fo’th, back an’ fo’th, like somepen whut’s trapped.”
“Somepen whut’s trapped,” kept ringing in Kitty’s head after she left the kitchen. This morning she felt like someone who had picked up half a dozen pieces of a jig-saw puzzle out of which she could make no sense at all. If she had had any idea of what was back of it all she might have pieced them together in an orderly pattern.
Later as she gathered fresh nasturtiums from the little flower bed under the living-room window, the vision of Lieutenant Cary and Chief Krome playing chess rose up to trouble her. Surely they could have nothing to do with her father’s anxieties. Yet she could not forget the mutual antagonism which Cary and Hazel had shown each other instantly, and she felt instinctively that they were all involved in a strange chess game which she had to play blindfolded. But she was determined, if her alertness could prevent it, that her father would never become a pawn to be sacrificed as Willard Dawson had been.
Suddenly she had a sense of guilt that she had given her father so little companionship lately. Then she thought of Nurse Dawson, and something he had said when she first arrived, “We must have her over to dinner some evening. It means so much to people in the service to go into real homes.”
“Why not have her over tonight?” she thought. She had an evening free of Canteen work, and Dad definitely needed cheering up. She hurried to her desk drawer to study her ration books to see if there were enough points left for a decent roast. Since Dad had been eating two meals at home he also had books, which helped out greatly, and with Jane’s books added she had much more latitude in her buying.
Her father had just reached his office when Kitty got him on the phone. She made her tone as sprightly as possible when she asked, “Dad, how about having Hazel over to dinner tonight?”