The tall, handsome youth went to the place where he had left his small portable canoe and paddled it around.
“Miss Dories,” he called, “this craft rides better if there are two in it. May I have the pleasure of your company?”
Blushing prettily, Dories took Carl’s proffered hand and stepped in the canoe. Nann, Dick and Gib, in the punt, led the way.
Half an hour later, high on the rocks, the five young people ate the good lunch the girls had prepared and told one another the outstanding events of their lives. “I’m wild to meet your sister, Mr. Ovieda,” Dories told him. “Does she still look like a lily, all gold and white. That was the way Gib’s father described her.”
The tall lad nodded. “Yes, Sister is a very pretty blonde. She has iris blue eyes and hair like spun gold, as fairy books say. I want you all to come to our home in Boston just as soon as we are settled.” His invitation, Nann was pleased to see, included Gib as well as the others. That embarrassed lad replied, with a hunch of his right shoulder, “Dunno as I’ll ever be up to the big town. Dunno’s I ever will.”
“You’re wrong there, Gib!” Dick exclaimed in the tone of one who could no longer keep a most interesting secret. “You know how you have wished and wished that you could have a chance to go to a real school. Well, Dad has been trying to work it so that you might have that chance, and, just before I came away, he told me that he had managed to get a scholarship for you in a boys’ school just out of Boston. Why, what’s the matter, Gib? It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
It was hard to understand the country boy’s expression. “Yeah!” he confessed. “That thar’s what I’ve been hankerin’ fer. It sure is.” Then, as a slow grin lit his freckled face, he exclaimed: “It’s hit me so sudden, sort of, but I reckon I kinder feel the way yo’re feelin’,” he nodded toward the grandson of old Colonel Wadbury, “as though I’d found a deed to suthin, when I’d never expected to have nuthin’ not as long as I’d live.”
The girls were deeply touched by Gib’s sincere joy and they told him how glad they were for his good fortune. Then Carl Ovieda sprang to his feet, saying that he was sorry to break up the party, but that he must be winging on his way. He held out his hand to each of the group as he bade them good-bye, turning, last of all, to Dories, to whom he said: “I shall let you know as soon as we are settled. I want you and my sister to be good friends.”
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE BEST SURPRISE OF ALL
As the four young people neared the home cabin, they were amazed to behold Miss Moore seated in a rocker on the front porch and, instead of her house dress, she had on her traveling suit. Dories leaped up the steps, exclaiming, “Why, Aunt Jane, what has happened?”