“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 was decided that she should, at the end of her freshman year in high school, attend the preparatory school for girls, known as Lakeview Hall, Bess was determined that her chum, Nan Sherwood, should go with her.
But Nan’s parents were not situated at all as were Bess Harley’s—neither financially or otherwise. Mr. Robert Sherwood had been, for years, foreman of a department in the Atwater Mills. Suddenly the mills were closed and Nan’s father—with multitudes of other people—found his income cut off.
He owned a little cottage on Amity Street; but it was not all paid for, as Nan’s mother had been a semi-invalid for a number of years and much of the money Mr. Sherwood might have saved, had gone for medical attention for “Momsey,” as Nan called her mother.
But the invalid wife and mother was the bravest and most cheerful of the three who lived in “the dwelling in amity,” as Mr. Sherwood called the little cottage, and it was she who inspired them to hope for better times ahead.
Nan could not fail to be benefited in character by such an example as her mother set; but the girl very well knew that, in their then present circumstances, there was no possibility of her entering Lakeview Hall in the fall with Bess Harley.