CHAPTER IV[ToC]
THE PREMATURE CAMP
After all, the last days of school came and went, and the Glenwood girls had started off for their respective homes before Dorothy had a chance to fully realize that the vacation had really begun, and that each day of that delightful calendar now seemed suspended from the very skies, illumined with the prospects of the very best of good times.
Dorothy had promised to spend a greater part of the summer with Rose-Mary Markin at the Markin summer place, a delightful spot on Lake Monadic in Maine. This plan was particularly fortunate, as Mrs. Winthrop White, Dorothy's Aunt Winnie, with whom the Dales had lately made their home, was to go abroad, while Ned and Nat, Dorothy's cousins, had arranged such a varied itinerary for their summer sports, that one might imagine, to hear the schedule, that the particular summer involved must have been of the brand which has neither night nor autumn to mark its limits.
Then Major Dale, and Dorothy's brothers, Joe and Roger, were to take a long-promised cruise on the St. Lawrence, so that Dorothy was quite at liberty to plan for herself.
But these plans could never interfere with a visit to the Cedars, the White's summer home, and here, on the afternoon of which we write, Dorothy found herself at last surrounded by her family, and submerged in their joyous welcome.
"Roger, how you have grown!" she kept saying as her eyes, time after time, sought out the "baby" brother of whom Dorothy was so fond. "And Joe! Why, you are getting to look so much like Nat——"
"Here, now! No knocking!" called out the jolly Nat. "I don't want to be handsome, but I simply refuse to look ten years younger!" This last was said in imitation of the "lady-like way" girls are supposed to have in expressing their compliments.
"And me?" asked Ned, pulling himself up out of his high-enough height before his cousin. "What is the verdict? Am I not—ahem—stunning?"