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.
He could see over the heads of the few curious passengers who had surged around them.
"Was your bag like Miss Riggs'?" he 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."