"Father wanted me to go to Paris," he said. "If I meant to be a physician, I think I would. But first and last and always I mean to be an American citizen. I suppose I might go to Yale or Harvard, but that seems almost as far away, and my choice appears more satisfactory all around," smiling a little. "We like the new, but we have a hankering for the old civilizations, and the accretions of knowledge."
They both looked out over the Golden Gate, the ocean. There were dancing sails, jungles of masts, cordage like bits of webs, tossing whitecaps in strong contrast to the blue, and over beyond, the green, wooded shores. The old semaphore's gaunt arms were dilapidated, and it was to come down. But it had thrilled hundreds of hearts with its tidings that friends, neighbors, and greatest joy of all, letters from loved ones in lands that seemed so distant then.
Now the lack of rain had dried up vegetation, except the cactus and some tufts of hardy grass. The little rivulet was spent, there was only a bed of stones. But they had managed to keep something green and inviting about the house. A riotous Madeira vine flung out long streamers of fragrant white blooms that seemed to defy fate laughingly. Down below they were levelling again, this time for a last grade, it was said.
"It will all be so changed when I return. I wonder where you will go? For you cannot climb up to this eyrie. You would be perhaps a hundred feet up. They want the sand and the débris to fill in the big piers they are building. Why, they will almost sweep the great hill away, but they will have to leave the rocks by the sea. It will be a new San Francisco."
"Why, it is almost new now," and she smiled.
"Everything will have changed. And we shall change, too. I shall be twenty-three when I come back."
Laverne looked at him wonderingly. They had all been big boys to her, and she had been a little girl. True, he had grown to man's estate in height, and there was a dainty line of darkness on his upper lip. It had been so imperceptible that just now it seemed new to her.
"And I shall be—why, I shall be past nineteen then," she commented in surprise.
"And—and married," he hazarded. The thought gave him a pang, for that was new, too.
"No," she returned, looking up at him out of innocent eyes, while the faint rose tint in her cheek never deepened. "No, I shall not be married in a long, long time. Presently Uncle Jason and Miss Holmes and I are to set out on a journey, just as they do in some of the stories. We shall go to the strange lands he tells me about, we shall see the people in their native element," and she smiled at the conceit, "where we see only a dozen or two here. What do you suppose draws them to California?"