It was funny to hear the baby scold in French.
"Victor, you might take the little girl—Laverne, is it not? and show her the garden. I heard about your pets. You must have a charm."
Laverne smiled. They walked down the porch and Victor paused a moment to invite his friends to join them. They did not at once, but the two kept on. They turned down a wide alley, under some orange trees. The late blossoms had fruited, the early ones been killed by the unusual frost of the winter.
"Oh, it is so beautiful, so very beautiful!" she exclaimed, with almost the poignancy of joy. "I never supposed there was all this beauty such a little distance from us. Why didn't they come over here and build the city?"
"You will not ask that twenty years from this time. San Francisco will be one of the great cities of the world, the gateway of the Western coast, the link of everything splendid! Think of the Golden Gate, of the magnificent bay, where no enemy could touch a ship. And that rocky coast, a defence in itself."
"Twenty years," she repeated musingly. "Why, I shall be quite an old woman," and a look almost of terror flashed up in her face.
He laughed at her dismay. "I am not quite seventeen. Then I shall be thirty-seven, and I hope to have a home and be just as happy as my father is, and shall endeavor to be just as prosperous. But I wouldn't want you to call me an old man."
She flushed under his eager eyes.
"Everything grows finer here than in San Francisco. Even at the Estenegas it was not luxuriant like this."
"For fifteen years father has had it cultivated. There are two gardeners working all the time. He is so fond of beautiful things—trees, and flowers, and birds. No one is allowed to molest them. Oh, listen!"