"You should have been with me in Chicago, Cora—at my cousin, Pearl Graves', house. I tried to get Pearl—she's just about our age—to come to Lakeview Hall; but she goes to a private school right in her neighborhood—oh! a very select place. No girl like this wild Western person Polk is talking about, would be received there. No, indeed!"
"Hi, Linda!" broke in the irrepressible red-haired girl, "why didn't you try to enter that wonderful school?"
"I did ask to. But my father is so old-fashioned," complained Linda. "He would not hear of it. Said it would not be treating Dr. Beulah right."
"Oh, oh!" groaned Laura. "How the dear doctor would have suffered,
Linda, if you had not come back to her sheltering arms."
The laugh this raised among the party made Linda's cheeks flame more hotly than before. She would not look at the laughing group again. A flaxen-haired girl with pink cheeks and blue eyes—one of the smallest though not the youngest in the party—came timidly to Linda Riggs' elbow.
"Did you spend all your vacation in Chicago?" she asked gently. "I was to go to visit Grace; but there was sickness at home, and so I couldn't. Didn't the Masons come back with you, Linda?"
"And Nan Sherwood and Bess Harley?" questioned Amelia Boggs, the homely girl. "They went to the Masons' to visit, didn't they?"
"I'm sure I could not tell you much about them," Linda said, shrugging her shoulders. "I had something else to do, I can assure you, than to look up Sherwood and Harley."
"Why!" gasped the fair-haired girl, "Grace wrote me that you were at her house, and went to the theater with them, and that—that—"
"Well, what of it, Lillie Nevins?" demanded the other sharply.