Gap between body text and footer

Hi all, it's good to be back.

I'm very familiar with Frame 4, 6, 7 and 8 from my days as Tech Writer before retiring 9 years ago.  My next private writing project needs Frame but  some behavior 4 or 5 revs down the road still puzzles me.

Specifically, Frame inserts a gap of about 1 inch between the body text and the footnotes any time the footnote (or footnotes) exceeds four lines of text. A paragraph can rattle along, get to an EOL then boom!  Frame inserts the gap, cites the footnotes (correctly) then creates an ophan on the next page to finish the paragraph.

Changing the orphan/widow protection has no effect.  I found the frame attributes dialog for that master page but there didn't seem to be anyway to control the gap.  But maybe I'm looking in the wrong place.  Everything seems to have moved around in 9 years.... 😉

And yes, this won't occur unless the footnote(s) exceed(s) 4 lines.  The gap disappears (as does the orphan) when I move from a 5 line to a 4 line footnote.  But nothing else seemed to change the behavior.  

I suppose I could simply stick with 4 line footnotes through my book, but there's got to be a better solution.  Any ideas? 

Thanks!

David Blyth