“Come on, now,” Adair was always impatient with the elaborate courtesies of the south, impatient probably because he never felt at ease with them. “I always suspect,” Alice laughed once when she and Walker were talking about Adair’s abruptness, “that he’s more than a little afraid that some day some one of these strangers will break down and kiss him on the cheek.”
“I wonder what he would do?” Walker paused in speculation.
“You might try it yourself, sometime, and find out,” Alice retorted.
“Do you want to have me ousted bag and baggage from your presence, fair lady?” Walker questioned, but Alice never had a chance to answer, for just at that moment her father came upon the two and demanded all their attention.
Alice smiled over this in recollection now as they went through the door of the main building and into a spacious entrance hall with its big winding stairway, its high-beamed ceiling, and its pretty tiled floor. Walker caught the smile and guessed at its origin, but he said nothing as they were all escorted up the broad steps to their quarters.
“Ours, all ours?” Bess questioned when the Lakeview Hall girls were conducted to a suite of five rooms overlooking on one side the patio and the other, a river, broad fields, and mountains in the distance.
“Si, si, Señoritas,” the smiling Mexican maid, Soledad, who was to be theirs during their stay, hadn’t understood the question, but “Si, si,” seemed the proper answer. Now she bustled about trying to help them until her curiosity as to what was going on downstairs got the better of her and on some slight pretext she left.
“Just think of it!” Bess exclaimed when she had disappeared. “A whole suite of rooms of our own, a maid, and everything, oh, everything we can wish for. It’s a magic country and Adair MacKenzie is the presiding genie.”
“Well, he is in one way,” Laura admitted dryly. “When he waves his wand things happen.”
“Yes, and he goes up in smoke,” Nan added.