She was still standing, braced against the wall, when the girl came back with a laden tray, and Ginger put it on the waist-high shelf which served for a dressing table and she was able to manage very nicely. Nourishment seemed to unseal Aunt Fan’s lips. “I’ve made up my mind about the doctor,” she said, darkly. “My _Lord_--that man isn’t a suitor; he’s a mule driver! It wasn’t so bad the first hour, and even the second hour I could stand it by thinking about other things, but we rode until one before we stopped for lunch, and then I had to get off ... and to get on again ... and then we rode until six, and had supper and went to bed--to _bed_!” She groaned aloud, pausing with a bit of buttered biscuit half-way to her mouth. “He picked out the steepest hillside in the entire Santa Lucia Range, and the one with the most rocks on it ... all those rocks couldn’t have been born on it; he must have lugged some of them there! Then he blew up that sleeping bag; _sleeping_ bag! I’d like to know the village wag that invented it. It was like trying to rest on a school of hot-water bags; first I rolled off one side of it and then off the other, and then it slid down the grade--it was as slippery as if it had been buttered! It slid down five times and I guess I’d have gone straight down to the ocean and I wouldn’t have cared much, either, if the doctor hadn’t caught me as I went past, every time; he was ’way below that girl and me. Finally, he tied it to a tree.... I never closed my eyes all night, and that Dr. Rawdon never closed his mouth all night. I give you my word it sounded as if he was doing it on purpose; I should think his wife would poison him. And when I dozed off at four o’clock--I was so weak and exhausted I just lost myself for a moment--the doctor began calling people to get up! Ginger, I swear to you, if I’d had a weapon within reach I’d have murdered him. That’s all he’s done on this trip--call people to get up--up in the morning, up from a nap, up on the horses again. If he ever gets to Heaven they’ll retire Gabriel on pension and give him the trump!” She stopped, gasping a little, and ate earnestly for a moment. “Can you imagine me, making my toilet at quarter after four in the morning on a glassy hillside, Ginger McVeagh? I’d lost most of my hairpins and my lip stick and my powder in those slides, and I had to borrow from that canary-headed paper doll that’s vamping Dean Wolcott till he doesn’t know whether he’s afoot or horseback. The doctor started us off again before it was light, and we rode and we rode and we _rode_--” “I know, Aunt Fan. I know,” said Ginger, soothingly. “Now if you’ll just get to bed--” “Will you wait till I finish my supper? I tell you I’m weak for the want of food. And when we got to Slate’s, late yesterday afternoon, the doctor said I must take the hot sulphur bath or whatever it is, and I thought I would; I might be finished with him as a friend, but I could still take his advice as a physician. Well....”