“The worst possible thing for a runner in training to know is how fast, or how slow, he is,” she often declared, “Do your best each time; that is your business.”
So Bobby got into her street clothes and, having telephoned to her father as she had promised Eve Sitz, she ran home to pack her bag. On the way she passed by the house where Miss Carrington boarded. Gee Gee had two rooms in a wing of the old Boyce house, in which the Widow Boyce kept lodgers. Her front room had long, French windows which swung outward like doors upon the porch. And as Bobby ran by she saw a man come down from this porch, as though he had been listening at the windows, and hurry around the corner of the house and behind the thick hedge of the kitchen garden.
“That was the Gypsy—Jim Varey,” Bobby thought, hesitating before the house. “What is he haunting Gee Gee for? Ought she to know that he is hanging around?”
But the girl hesitated about going in and speaking to the teacher. Gee Gee, she considered, was really her arch-enemy. Why should she try to shield her from any trouble? And, too, Miss Carrington might not thank her for interfering in her private affairs.
So Bobby ran on home and told Mrs. Ballister where she was going, huddled a few things into her bag, kissed “the kids,” as she termed her sisters, and ran off for the station, there to meet Eve for the 5:14 train to Keyport.
And while she waited who should appear but that black-faced man with the gold hoops in his ears—Jim Varey!
The Gypsy saw her—Bobby knew he did. But he paid her no attention, slinking into the men’s room and not appearing again until Eve arrived and the two girls went aboard the train. Then Bobby saw him once more.
“Do you see that fellow, Eve?” she demanded, whispering into the bigger girl’s ear.
“What fellow?”
“There! he’s gone,” said Bobby, with a sigh. “I feared he was following us.”