No, Adair, she could see, hadn’t changed a bit. He still liked to manage people, still liked to follow up any impulsive idea that came to his active mind. Through the years, tales of his adventures had reached her by letter from friends and relatives. Adair himself was not given to writing. “Takes too much time,” he said. “Can’t sit still that long.”
His visit now was a surprise. He had arrived, unannounced, when she and Nan were in a turmoil unpacking the trunks that Nan had brought back from school with her. Only the peremptory peal of the doorbell had announced his coming. When she opened the door, he had taken her in his arms and kissed her and then, without even introducing Alice whom she had never met, he began immediately to call for Nan.
“Where’s that girl?” he asked almost before he was inside the door. “Come all the way up here from Memphis to see her and then she doesn’t even come to greet me.” In his impatience, he pounded on the floor with his cane. Mrs. Sherwood called her daughter.
“You’re Nan,” he said positively, when Nan finally entered the room. “I’m Adair. I would have known you anyplace. You look and walk and talk (Nan hadn’t said a word) just like your mother. The same eyes, the same hair, the same determined chin. Now I believe everything I’ve been hearing about you. Didn’t before. Sounded like a bunch of nonsense to me.”
“Young school girl takes part in English coronation. Young school girl saves child from rattlesnake. Young school girl saves life of old lady. Didn’t believe a word of it. Now I do. You’re going to Mexico with me.”
“Adair MacKenzie!” Mrs. Sherwood exclaimed. “Will you please lay your cane aside, take off your coat, put your hat down and have a chair before you go sweeping Nan off her feet with your scatterbrained ideas.
“Nan, don’t worry, darling,” she turned toward her daughter and laughed. “This man is really quite harmless. He is Adair MacKenzie, our cousin. Remember, the one we wrote to some years ago when we were in such trouble. He can’t help being like this. He’s always been so.”
“Well, well, well!” Adair grinned rather winningly at Mrs. Sherwood. “I must say, Jessie, you haven’t changed either. Still think you can manage me, do you? Alice,” he turned toward his daughter now for the first time, “this woman you see here is the only woman who ever thought she could wind me around her finger.”
Mrs. Sherwood and Alice exchanged sympathetic glances at this. Alice, too, if her father only knew it, had her ways of managing him. Nan’s mother knew this instinctively and liked Alice.
Nan liked her too. She was tall, slender, with blond curly hair and deep blue eyes. She was pretty and happy looking. And she liked Nan and hoped against hope that her father could work out his plan to induce Nan and her friends to come to Mexico with them. She sat quietly by while he plunged into the matter.