“There!” she exclaimed. “I’m through with—through with all of it! I don’t want to know how to act! I’ll never try! Dorothy! Dorothy!” and the miserable girl threw herself upon the bed in a frenzy of grief and excitement. “Just forgive me for it all—for trying to deceive you. I have been wretched all through it—and I only want you—and all the others—just as you used to be. I don’t believe in ambition!” She stood upright. “I’ll go home to dear, old Dalton, and stay there until—until I come to you at North Birchland.”
When the other girls tapped on the door of room nineteen late that afternoon, to say good-bye, they found two very happy young maidens waiting for the particular carriage that was to take them to the depot. Dorothy and Tavia could not be separated. They clung to each other in spite of all the invitations to “do the rounds” and join in the last and noisiest fun of the season. Together, very demurely, they called at the office to say good-bye to the teachers.
When, at last, the carriage did come for them, Dorothy and Tavia rode off together—one bound for the train to North Birchland, and the other going home—home to Dalton, to try to be happy in the little country town where she and Dorothy Dale had spent such a happy childhood, and where Tavia would find plenty of time to dream of things scattered far out in another world, that seemed like the golden fingers of ambition beckoning her on. To leave Dalton and the common school life—to enter the walks of city uncertainties—to become part of the great, grinding machine of human hardships—that machine which is always willing to stop its terrific speed long enough to gather into its cogs and meshes the life of an innocent young girl.
CHAPTER XI
A JOLLY HOME-COMING
“My! What great big boys! You can’t possibly be my little baby brother Roger. And Joe! Why he is like a real young gentleman in his tennis suit!” And Dorothy kissed her brothers over and over again, as they rode from the depot in the pony cart to the home of Aunt Winnie, “The Cedars,” at North Birchland.
“Oh, I don’t know,” drawled Joe, in his good-natured way. “You can’t complain. You’ve been doing some growing on your own account.”
“And you have got awfully pretty,” lisped Roger, as he “snuggled” up closer to his sister.
“I think you are just as perfectly handsome as any big lady.”
“My, you little flatterbox!” and Dorothy gave him an oldtime squeeze. “You have learned more than your A, B, Cs. at kindergarten. I received all your letters but could not answer the last two as we had such an awful lot of writing to do at the close when examinations came.”
“Did you pass?” asked the younger brother, by way of showing his understanding of the scholastic season.