The look that Betty gave Tommy might have made an angel weep—or sing. She folded the paper solemnly and handed it to him. Then silently but with one accord they hastened towards the Pogany dictionary to look up “inveterate.”
Betty lighted a lamp, and together they turned over the pages of the big book. Tommy put a greenish-yellow finger at the margin beside the word.
“Long-established? It ain’t a year yet. Deep-rooted? Not on your tin-type!” he declared. “Obstinate? I shouldn’t call it obstinate, should you?”
“I don’t believe Rose could turn her eyes if it were obstinate,” Betty opined.
“Nor they wouldn’t look as they do,” he added eagerly. “Obstinate is the very thing they ain’t. That’s sure enough.”
And Tommy began to dance wildly about the room. Impelled to join him, Betty remembered her aunt and held up a warning hand.
“Aunt Sarah will be down here in five minutes, Tommy,” she whispered, “so we can’t waste any time, though I was never so excited in my life. Let’s sit right here on the sofa and make our plans quick. When will we take Rose over to Millville? To-morrow?”
“Sure. That’s the last day Dr. Vandegrift’s there,” he said.
“O, Tommy!” cried Betty with tears in her shining eyes. “It’s all too beautiful. It seems more than I can bear. Just listen—everything is right. Aunt Sarah is going over to Greenmeadow to-morrow to spend the day. All I shall have to do will be to get father’s dinner. Then I’ll just ask him if I may spend the afternoon with Rose, and we’ll take her over.”
Tommy sprang suddenly from the sofa as if he had sat on a pin. And his expression was in accord.