“You don’t understand,” said Ginger. Her voice was adamant, too. “You don’t understand at all. Well--I’ll see him, for a minute.” She nodded to a hovering partner and went down the long corridor to Aleck’s room. Her aunt did not understand and she did not understand herself, all that was swaying her. It wasn’t alone that her lover had cut a sorry figure on horseback; it was that she, Ginger McVeagh, feudal lady of the range, princess of the blood in the eyes of her henchmen, had said, in effect--“There is no one among you all fit to be my mate; I must have a stranger, an easterner, some one higher and finer. Now I have found him! Wait until you see him--wait, and behold why I have chosen him.” They had waited and they had beheld, and now, she knew, for all their civility about it and their good-natured inquiries about him they were amused and amazed that she should have picked Dean Wolcott; they were aghast, as she was aghast. Old Manuela was seated beside the bed but she rose at once and waddled out into the hall. She had been waiting and watching anxiously for her mistress for an hour, and she was sure, in her simple heart, that everything would be all right now. The big room was only dimly lit, but she could see how shockingly white and ill he looked. Nevertheless, it roused in her no whispering gentleness this time, as it had done on Christmas Day; healthy young animal that she was--she had taken mumps and measles and chicken pox on her feet and never spent an hour of daylight in bed in all her life--it rather repelled her. He opened his eyes in time to catch something of her mood in her expression and his own face stiffened. “You shouldn’t have bothered to come; I’m quite all right. Manuela and your aunt have looked after me.” Again, he blinked his tired eyes a little, as he had at his first sight of her, months ago; she was too bright, too vivid, too glowing. It would not have been difficult to recapture the magic of the night before; if Ginger had dropped to her knees and kissed him as she had kissed him then--if Dean had managed a ragged sentence of regret for disappointing her--’Rome Ojeda would have waited long for his next dance. But instead, she stood looking down at his pallor and limpness and he lay looking up at her scarlet cheeks and her incredible vigor, and the moment got away from them. Presently, Ginger hoped with an edge in her voice that he’d have a good night, and Dean trusted, with ice in his, that she’d have a good time. They did their best, in the week that followed. Dean was limping about by noon and Ginger staying at home to be with him, and they were gentle with each other, but it scared and sobered them to see that it wasn’t any use. It was as if they had been blowing bubbles together, lovely, shimmering iridescent ones, which had fallen and burst, and now they were trying to gather up the little damp spots which were left and make billowy, floating bubbles out of them again.