“Quite sure.”
“And—and—he——”
The man’s voice actually trembled. Dorothy looked at him again, dropped the sewing from her lap and suddenly flung her arms about his neck.
“Oh, my dear!” she murmured, her face hidden. “I know he loves me, too. I am sure of it! Let me tell you.”
Breathlessly, her voice quavering a little but full of an element of happiness that fairly thrilled her listener, she related all the incidents—even the petty details—of her acquaintance with Garford Knapp, of Desert City. So clear was her picture of the young man that the major saw him in his mind’s eye just as Garry appeared to Dorothy Dale.
She went over every little thing that had happened in New York in connection with the young Westerner. She told of her own mean suspicions and how they had risen from a feeling of pique and jealousy that never in her life had she experienced before.
“That was a rather small way for me to show real feeling for a person. But it caught me unprepared,” said Dorothy, with a full-throated laugh although her eyes were full of tears. “I do not believe I am naturally of a jealous disposition; and I should never let such a feeling get the better of me again. It has cost me too much.”
She went on and told the major of the incidents that followed and how Garry Knapp had gone away so hastily without her speaking to him again.
But the major rather lost the thread of her story for a moment. He was staring closely at her, shaking his shaggy head slowly.
“My dear! my dear!” he murmured, “you have grown up. The bud has unfolded. Our demure little Dorothy is—and with shocking abruptness—blown into full womanhood. My dear!” and he put his arms about her again more tightly.