“I want to see this wonderful Garry Knapp—don’t you, Sister? I’m sure he must be a perfectly wonderful young man to so stir our Dorothy.”
“No,” Dorothy said slowly shaking her head. “I know he is only wonderful in my eyes. But I am quite sure you and Aunt Winnie will commend my choice when you have met him—if we can only get him here!”
CHAPTER XXIII
NAT JUMPS AT A CONCLUSION
All this time Tavia and Nat were having anything but a happy life. Nat would not have admitted it for the world, but he wished he could leave home and never appear at The Cedars again until Tavia had gone.
On her part, Tavia would have returned to Dalton before the new year had Dorothy allowed her to have her own way. Dorothy would not hear of such a thing.
To make the situation worse for the pair of young people so tragically enduring their first vital misunderstanding, Ned and Jennie Hapgood were sailing upon a sea of blissful and unruffled happiness. Nat and Tavia could not help noting this fact. The feeling of the exalted couple for each other was so evident that even the Dale boys discussed it—and naturally with deep disgust.
“Gee!” breathed Joe, scandalized. “Old Ned is so mushy over Jennie Hapgood that he goes around in a trance. He could tread on his own corns and not know it, his head is so far up in the clouds. Gee!”
“I wouldn’t ever get so silly over a girl—not even our Dorothy,” Roger declared. “Would you, Joe?”
“Not in a hundred years,” was his brother’s earnest response.
The major admitted with a chuckle that Ned certainly was hard hit. The time set for Jennie Hapgood to return to Sunnyside Farm came and passed, and still many reasons were found for the prolongation of her visit. Ned went off to New York one day by himself and brought home at night something that made a prominent bulge in his lower right-hand vest pocket.