“Do you suppose he is really after that girl?” observed Laura, thoughtfully.
“Whether he is, or not, it’s none of our business, I suppose,” returned Jess, who was Mother Wit’s closest chum.
“I’m not so sure of that.”
“My goodness! if they’re Gypsies, we don’t want to have anything to do with them,” exclaimed Dorothy.
“Oh, the Romany people aren’t so bad,” said Eve Sitz, easily. “They have customs of their own, and live a different life from we folk——”
“Or ‘us folk?’” suggested Nellie, smiling.
“From other folk, anyway!” returned the big girl, cheerfully. “They come through this section every Spring—and sometimes later in the year, too. We have often had them at the house,” she added, for Eve’s father had a large farm, and from that farm the seven girls had started on this long walk early in the morning.
It was the Easter vacation at Central High and these friends were all members of the junior class. Centerport, the spires and tall buildings of which they could now see in the distance, was a wealthy and lively city of some hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, situated on the southern shore of Lake Luna, a body of water of considerable size.
At either end of the lake was another large town—namely Lumberport and Keyport. In each of these latter cities was a well conducted high school, and in Centerport there were three—the East and West Highs, and Central High, the newest and largest.
For a year now the girls of all these five high schools had been deeply interested in athletics, including the games usually played upon the Girls’ Branch Athletic League grounds—canoeing, rowing, ski running, and lastly, but not least in value according to the estimation of their instructors, walking. Usually the physical instructor of Central High, Mrs. Case, accompanied her pupils on their walking tours; but this vacation the seven friends who now stood upon the summit of this big, gray rock, had determined to indulge in a long walk by themselves, and they had come over to Eve Sitz’s house the night before so as to get an early start on the mountain road to Fielding, twenty miles away. From that place they would take the train back to Centerport, and Eve was to remain all night with Laura at the Belding home.