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, The summer of love together, And that one of us tired and lay down to rest, Ere the coming of wintry weather--_ and always turned away from the spinnet with her dark eyes wet.