“The brooms.”
“‘Brooms’!” cried Dorothy. “Grooms, Ned?”
“He’s a ‘new broom’ all right,” chuckled Edward White. “Poor chap! he doesn’t know what it means to love, honor, obey, and buy frocks and hats for a girl of to-day.”
“Pah!” retorted his brother, “you’d like to be in his shoes, Nedward.”
“Me? I—guess—not!” declared Edward. “I have my own shoes to stand in, thank you,” and Ned looked at Jennie Hapgood with a meaning air.
So the party came back to The Cedars in much the same state as it had gone to the wedding. Ned and Jennie were so much taken up with each other that they were frankly oblivious to the mutual attitude of Nat and Tavia. Dorothy Dale was kept busy warding off happenings that might attract the particular attention of Major Dale and Aunt Winnie to the real situation between the two.
Besides, Dorothy had “troubles of her own,” as the saying goes. She felt that she must decide, and neglect the decision no longer, a very, very important matter that concerned herself more than it did anybody else in the world—a matter that she was selfishly interested in.
Ample time had passed now for Dorothy Dale to consider from all standpoints this really wonderful thing that had come into her life and had so changed her outlook. On the surface she might seem the same Dorothy Dale to her friends and relatives; but secretly the whole world was different to her since that shopping trip she and Tavia had taken to New York wherein she and her chum had met Garry Knapp.
A thousand times Dorothy had called up the details of every incident of the adventure—this greatest of all adventures Dorothy Dale had ever entered upon.
She felt that she should never meet again a man like Garry Knapp. None of the boys she had known before had ever made much of an impression on Dorothy Dale’s well-balanced mind. But from the beginning she had looked upon the young Westerner with a new vision. His reflection filled the mirror of her thought as splendidly as at first. The dimple that showed faintly in one bronzed cheek, his rather large but well-formed features, his mop of black hair, his broad shoulders and well-set-up body—all these personal attributes belonging to Garry Knapp were as clearly fixed in Dorothy’s mind now as at first.