This time she waited even longer before answering. She was calling up the memory of the Christmas day--the first meeting in the morning; the look of him as he came toward her in the rich light of the setting sun, his weary speech; the way his eyes had kindled. “I think,” she said, wholly unaware that she was speaking with the same whispering gentleness with which she had spoken to him, “he is different from--everybody else in the world.” Aunt Fan said nothing more, and tiptoed hastily away from the subject. She wrote that night to her former husband--she always wrote to thank him for the alimony--“Jim, I’m keeping my fingers crossed! She’s simply bowled over by this chap, and he certainly must be interested, to cross the continent in July. Heavens, but I’d be glad to see her settled--married to somebody beside a cow-puncher--living in civilization! I wish you’d slip down to Boston and look him up, will you? That’s a lamb! His name is Dean Wolcott and he’s a Harvard man, and a sort of architect. When I think what it would mean to me, to be sure I’d never have to visit her on the ranch again! Be careful not to rush around in the heat, Jim; Boston air is like pudding sauce and you know you never had any sense of taking care of yourself. Let me hear immediately what you find out.” Ginger had been honest with her aunt. She didn’t know what Dean Wolcott was like, but she would know on Friday! She was not analytical or introspective enough to know what he stood for; to realize that he was--up to that time--not a person to her, but a quality, a substance; he was all the heroes of all the books she had never read; he was the music she had never heard; the far places she had never seen. And he was silvered and hallowed by his association with her beloved dead brother. * * * * * Dean Wolcott’s cousin--the other Mr. Wolcott who had disapprovingly guided him across the continent and back--asked him, searchingly, what he was going out to California _for_. Dean Wolcott wasn’t able to tell him; he wasn’t able to tell himself. He said to his kinsman and reiterated to himself that he wanted to have a look at that bridge; he had designed it in a white heat of enthusiasm, and while he believed it was good, he was anxious to see it finished. Also, he was at some pains to tell his cousin and his own consciousness, he felt he ought to see Miss McVeagh again; he had been a spineless weakling, sleeping away his one day there; it was the very least he could do for old Aleck to see her once more, and tell her, by word of mouth, the things which were flat and cold on the written page.