bag?” returned Bess, with wide-open eyes. “Why! haven’t you brought it?”

“Well!” But there! What was the use? Nan knew well just how heedless Bess was. There was positively no good in getting angry with her. “Here!” she exclaimed, thrusting the suit-case, the lunch box, and her chum’s own wrap into Bess’ hands. “Get a seat if you can and hold on to these while I go back for that bag.”

“I must have left it right in the chair you sat in,” said Bess, feebly.

Nan did not hear this. She had some trouble in getting back into the car, for she was stemming the tide of outflowing passengers.

She reached the spot at last. The more moderately moving passengers were all about her. On the floor between two of the chairs was the russet bag.

Nan seized it quickly and turned to hasten back to her chum. The aisle was clear for the moment and she ran.

Almost instantly a shrill voice cried out behind her:

“Here! how dare you? That’s my bag. Stop thief!”

Nan Sherwood cast a horrified glance over her shoulder. Yes! the voice addressed her. An angry girl, very fussily and expensively dressed, had started wildly down the car after Nan, and again she shrieked:

“Stop thief!”

CHAPTER II
ALL ABOUT NAN

Nan Sherwood stumbled and would have fallen, for she could not pick her steps very safely with her gaze directed behind, had not a firm hand seized her shoulder. The gentleman who did this may have been as intent upon detaining the girl as upon saving her from an overthrow.

“Hoity-toity!” he ejaculated, in a rather querulous voice. “Hoity-toity!” he repeated. “What’s this I hear? ‘Stop thief’? Impossible!”

He was a lean-faced man with a deeply lined countenance, a big nose, and shell-bowed spectacles through which his pale, gray eyes twinkled, after all, in a rather friendly way. Or so the startled Nan thought in those few seconds that elapsed before the other girl reached them.

“Impossible!” repeated the man, having looked into Nan’s eyes.

“I guess it isn’t impossible!” cried the over-dressed girl, seizing the handle of the russet bag and trying to jerk it out of Nan’s hand. “The bold thing! She is a thief! And see her! She won’t give it up!”

“Why—it’s my bag!” murmured Nan, horrified by this utterly unexpected situation.

“It’s not! it’s mine!” asserted the other girl, striving with all her might to secure the bag.

But Nan Sherwood was no weakling. In fact, she was really very strong for her age. And her spring and summer in the Big Woods had bronzed her skin almost to the hue of a winter-cured oak-leaf. Her muscles were as well developed as a boy’s. The angry girl could not get the russet bag away from Nan’s secure grip.

“Wait! wait, young ladies!” urged the gentleman with the spectacles that made him look so owl-like. “There must be some mistake here.”

“There is!” snapped the angry girl. “It’s a mistake to let a little thief like her ride with respectable people. I’m going to have her arrested! I—I’ll tell my father——”

All the time she was thus incoherently accusing Nan, she was likewise endeavoring to get possession of the bag. But Nan had no idea of giving up her Aunt Kate’s beautiful present.

“Why—why!” Nan gasped. “It’s mine! I bought it myself!”

“What a story!” shrieked the other girl. “A dowdy little thing like you never owned such a bag. Look at my card on the handle.”

“That should settle it,” said the bespectacled gentleman, with confidence, and he reached for the bag.

Nan allowed him to take it. To her amazement he slipped an engraved visiting card out of the frame set into the bag’s handle. Nan almost dropped. She had not noticed the card during the struggle and she knew she never had owned a visiting card like that in her life.

The gentleman held the card very close to his eyes to read the name engraved upon it.

“Ahem!” he said. “I thought I recognized you, Miss Riggs, despite your wild state of alarm. ‘Miss Linda Riggs,’” he added, repeating the name on the card. “Quite right. The bag is yours, Miss Riggs.”

“I should think you would have known that, Professor Krenner, when I first spoke,” snapped the girl, seizing the bag ungratefully from his hand. “Anybody ought to see what that girl is!” and she eyed poor Nan with a measure of disdain that might have really pained the Tillbury girl had she not just then been so much troubled by another phase of the incident.

“Why! where—where is my bag, then?” Nan gasped.

Professor Krenner glanced sideways at her. He was a peculiar old gentleman, and he believed deeply in his own first impressions. Nan’s flushed face, her wide-open, pained eyes, her quivering lips, told a story he could not disbelieve. The professor’s mind leaped to a swift conclusion.

“Are you sure you sat just there, child?” he asked Nan.

“Oh—I——”

He could see over the heads of the few curious passengers who had surged around them.

“Was your bag like Miss Riggs’?” he asked.

“Exactly,” breathed Nan.

Just then a soft, drawling voice asked:

“Any ob yo’ ladies an’ gemmen done lef’ a bag?”

The porter held out a russet leather traveling bag. Nan leaped for it with a cry of relief.

“It belongs to the young lady, porter,” said Professor Krenner, authoritatively.

“Why, the bags are just alike!” cried one lady.

“I don’t believe a dowdy thing like her ever honestly owned a bag like mine in this world!” Linda Riggs exclaimed bitterly, “She stole it.”

Another passenger laughed. “As far as we know, my girl, you may have stolen your bag.”

“How dare you?” gasped the dressy girl. “I guess you don’t know who my father is?”

“I confess the crass ignorance that engulfs my mind upon that important point,” laughed the unimpressed man, who looked as though he might be of some importance himself. “Who is your father, my dear?”

“He is Mr. Henry W. Riggs, and he just about owns this railroad,” said the girl, proudly.

“I have heard of him,” agreed the man. “And you may tell him from me that if I owned as much stock in this road as he is supposed to, I’d give the public better service for its money,” and the passengers went away, laughing at the purse-proud and arrogant girl.

Meanwhile Nan Sherwood had thanked the porter for recovering her bag and Professor Krenner for championing her cause. She did not look again at the girl who had so hurt and insulted her. But she was very pale and quiet as she went back to rejoin her chum, Bess Harley, in the other car.

That was the way of Nan Sherwood. When she was hurt she never cried over it openly; nor was it often that she gave vent to a public expression of anger.

For her age, Nan was strangely self-contained and competent. Not that she was other than a real, happy, hearty schoolgirl with a deal more than her share of animal spirits. She was so very much alive that it had been hard for her to keep her body still enough to satisfy her teachers at the Tillbury High School which, until the middle of the previous winter, she had attended with her chum.

Bess’ father was well-to-do and Bess had had almost everything she really craved since the hour she was born, being the oldest of the “Harley tribe,” as she expressed it. When it