And, just as he had stopped wondering, Ginger stopped being afraid. She went to him steadily, her head high.
He was bareheaded still, and she noticed now for the first time that his hair was very fair and very fine, brushed sleekly back from his forehead, shining; that he was taller than she had realized; that there was a look of power about him for all his slimness and his cool coloring. Then she stopped noticing altogether, because he had come swiftly to her and caught her in his arms.
“Here, on Aleck’s bridge,” he said, happily. “We’ve come to each other across Aleck’s bridge; it was Aleck who brought us together.” Then he ceased talking about Aleck and kissed her. “Scotch granite and Spanish flame; that is what you are,” he told her, holding her away from him for an instant to consider her. “There was never any one like you; you have a stern Scotch chin and a soft Spanish mouth; you are—” then, aware of the way he was wasting time, he left off making phrases and kissed her Spanish mouth, and Estrada, riding in from the range, reined in his horse and stared, wide-eyed, and Aunt Fan, coming out on to the veranda, looked down at them and gasped, and wondered when the result of Jim’s investigations would come, and old Manuela, watching from a window, crossed herself and called fervently upon her favorite saint.
But for the two on Aleck’s bridge there was, for that slender, golden, perishable moment, no one else in the glowing world.
CHAPTER IV
THE world continued to be otherwise uninhabited and to glow rosily for almost a fortnight. Ginger’s Aunt Fan received a very satisfactory letter from Jim Featherstone; the Wolcott Family was as solid as Plymouth Rock, and contemporaneous with it. Dean Wolcott was a young man of excellent lineage, character, and achievement—known already, at twenty-eight, for unusual and original work in his line. He had gone in mildly for athletics at Harvard, topped his classes, made two of the best clubs. He had been popular in a quiet and discriminating fashion.
At the end of his letter Aunt Fan’s ex-husband allowed himself a bit of facetiousness. “I’ve sleuthed the lad down very thoroughly. But—Tremont Street and Dos Pozos! Well, it may work out, if he likes paprika on his Boston beans!”
Mrs. Featherstone was extremely pleased with this report, but she was likewise thorough, so she sent out a hurry call for her good friend, Doctor Gurney Mayfield. This was the doctor with whom they should have supped at Tait’s on the night of Ginger’s shabby arrival in San Francisco, and he had known Aunt Fan since she was nineteen years old and weighed ninety-eight pounds and she would always be Miss Fanny to him. He had taken care of her first husband through his last illness, the more zealously and devotedly because he had always considered him a rival, and he had thought then, after a decent interval, to renew his suit (that was what he called it in his courtly and chivalrous heart) but his Miss Fanny, some time before his idea of that interval had elapsed, met and married Jim Featherstone and went with him to New York and lived unhappily ever after. He was honestly regretful and soberly elated to have her back in California again, and calling on him as always for escort and counsel, and now he came at once at her summons, driving down from the prosperous ranch where he spent his time after retiring from a beloved and almost boundless practice.
Ginger was a great favorite with him; he was keenly concerned about her choice. The thought of her marriage had always made him a little anxious; she was her father and her mother—truly, as her lover had said in his rhapsodic moment, Scotch granite and Spanish flame. The doctor had seen something of the home life of Rosalía Valdés and Alexander McVeagh; it had been quite lyrically perfect, but very high keyed, and he had wondered if it would—or could—last down the years. The Spanish woman had a small velvet voice, convent-trained, and she sat often at the rosewood spinnet which had belonged to her mother before her and sang the songs of the period. They were very sweet and very sentimental and packed with pathos, and some one invariably died in the second verse. He remembered that she had loved best one which ran something after this fashion—
Perhaps it is better we lived as we did,