"The very best ever," echoed Nan.
"Going to let me out?" demanded Walter.
"No, indeed, Walter, you are included."
The girls and Walter continued to compare notes, when all of a sudden Rhoda uttered a cry.
"Girls, am I seeing a ghost?" she asked, staring straight ahead of her toward a group of richly dressed people who were talking and laughing together. "Or is that Linda Riggs?"
"Goodness, don't say it, Rhoda!" cried Bess in dismay. "It can't be Linda!"
But it was! For at that moment the youngest of the much over-dressed women in the group turned with a laugh to speak to someone behind her, and the girls found themselves face to face with their schoolgirl enemy, Linda Riggs.
For all their dislike of the girl, the chums would have spoken to her. But Linda stared at them coolly for a second, and then deliberately turned her back upon them and began to speak to a tall, gray-haired man at her right, who the girls instinctively felt must be her father, the railroad president.
"Those young ladies seemed to know you, my dear," they heard the tall man say to Linda, as, flushed and indignant, the girls and Walter pressed on through the crowd.