That was exactly what she had done, herself, and Alexander McVeagh had followed her, ten years later, contentedly, for all his devotion to his son and daughter. He wasn’t at all sure, in his rugged and unadorned version of his forbears’ belief, that he should find her again in the world to come, but he was very sure that the world he was leaving was not much of a world without her. Aleck, the son, had been a simple and uncomplex creature; all McVeagh. It was the girl who combined her father and her mother in a baffling and intricate fashion. The doctor wondered; it would have been simpler and safer, he considered, for Virginia Valdés McVeagh to marry a neighboring rancher--even Jerome Ojeda--though he lacked a little of the fineness the doctor wanted for her--than a Wolcott of Boston. Doctor Mayfield’s opportunities for studying them together were limited; when they were together--save at meal-times--they took excellent care to be alone together. They motored all over the surrounding landscape by day and by night--it was, by a special dispensation of Providence, a time of white and silver moonlight--and tramped high into the hills. This in itself was an amazing spectacle--Ginger McVeagh afoot; from her tiny childhood she had never walked except on her way to a horse. Dean Wolcott loved walking, however, and she loved Dean Wolcott and the thing was accomplished. Besides, by an odd and dramatically arranged combination of circumstances, she had not, for that period, a horse to offer him. Aleck’s horse, Felipe, which she usually rode, had a wrenched foot, and was turned out, and she was riding her own horse Diablo, about the business of the ranch. Estrada and his men were using all the others, bringing in the stock from the farther feeding pastures. Ordinarily, she would have borrowed a mount for him from a neighbor, but it was a part of the newness and strangeness of things to be motoring and tramping with her strange new lover. At such times, however, as she had to be about the business of Dos Pozos, the doctor held satisfying converse with Dean Wolcott. He liked him heartily, and reported to Aunt Fan as favorably as Jim Featherstone had done, and after five days he went north again, satisfied with the newcomer as an individual, hopeful about him as Ginger’s husband, and Aunt Fan was left alone. “Well, it’s ‘_the summer of love_’ they’re living now, Miss Fanny,” he told her at leaving. “We can only hope it’ll be big enough to see them through ‘_the coming of wintry weather_.’” But he shook his head. Since he had given up the patching and mending of bodies he had given a lot of thought to minds and souls and temperaments; he was rather well up on them. * * * * *