place we are going to.”

“I’ve done that a thousand times since I met you in St. Louis,” Nan responded as she pulled off her dress and slipped her arms into the lounging robe that the Lakeview Hall girls had given her at a surprise party in her honor more than a year before.

“Oh, no, you haven’t,” Laura denied. “We made you spend most of the time telling us about this angel of a cousin that appeared out of a clear sky and offered to take us all to Mexico. Doesn’t sound real even now when we’re here.”

“There’s one thing about it,” Amelia added, “if one can’t have rich relations oneself, the next best thing in the world is to have charming friends who have them.”

“Here, here!” Laura raised a protesting hand. “You’re out of order. The first thing you know Nan will be thinking we’re fond of her.”

“Oh, you old ducks,” Nan looked at them all fondly. “Don’t you know that cousin Adair knew that if he didn’t invite all of you that I wouldn’t come at all? Now, let’s forget all of this gratitude stuff. It embarrasses me.”

“All right then,” Bess agreed, “but you really haven’t told Rhoda anything at all about the hacienda, Nan.”

“I don’t know anything myself,” Nan admitted after some hesitation. “I’ve tried and tried to get cousin Adair to tell me something about the place, but he just won’t say anything. I’m not sure whether he knows and won’t tell or whether he doesn’t know himself. At any rate, he’s being extremely mysterious about the whole thing. Says that we didn’t see anything when we saw Emberon, that this place that we are going has that beat all hollow. Now what do you people make of that?”

“Dungeons, secret passage, weird wailing of bagpipes, that’s what Emberon had,” Laura summarized. “If this Mexican hacienda has anything better to offer, I’d like to see it.”

“And so would I,” Nan agreed. She almost resented the idea that anything could possibly be any nicer than the old Blake estate in Scotland. “And listen, he says this further, that if we think we had adventures in Scotland and England, we just haven’t seen anything yet. What in the world do you suppose he means?”