“I’ll meet you at the corner, at ten o’clock,” he said. “And we can’t carry much baggage. We can’t run with a trunk, and we may have to run.”
“Do we say good-bye to anyone?” asked Fred.
“Not a single person,” said Bobby, “Not even your mother. And remember not to bang the front door. Daddy is going to lodge meeting tonight, I think, so I can get away easily.”
After the boys had gone, Bobby did not go back to where Meg and the twins were playing with Mr. White. Instead he went upstairs and began to pack. He spread out a clean handkerchief on the window sill in his room and in it he put his pocket-knife, the one Twaddles always wanted to borrow, two gum drops that were so hard he had never expected to eat them, the watch spring Uncle Dave had given him and which he meant to use in an “invention” some day, and a piece of soft, kneaded rubber. These were the things he liked best and he thought they would all be useful on a journey.
“What red cheeks Bobby has!” said Mother Blossom at dinner that night. “I do hope he hasn’t taken cold, playing in the snow.”
“I’m all right,” declared Bobby, wishing that everyone would not look at him. He was afraid they would see that he was excited because he was going to run away.
CHAPTER XII
RUNNING AWAY
AS it happened, Bobby could not have chosen a better night for running away. That is, for running away without being found out. Father Blossom hurried off to his lodge meeting directly after dinner, and then the telephone bell rang and Mrs. Ward, a neighbor who lived near, asked Mother Blossom and Uncle Dave and Aunt Miranda to come over to her house and spend the evening.
“I ought to be packing our things,” said Aunt Miranda, when Mother Blossom told her. “But we’re not going till the eleven o’clock train, and I suppose I’ll have time in the morning; I’d like to go, Margaret, and so would Dave.”
That left Norah in charge of the house and of the four little Blossoms, and she sent them to bed the minute the clock struck eight. Norah believed that all children should go to bed early and it never did any good to coax her to let one stay up a single second past bedtime hour. She waited till they were all in bed, then put out the lights in their rooms, raised the windows and went downstairs to read her paper in the kitchen.