Her voice trembled from exhaustion. She took a few unsteady steps. The noon bells began to ring, and again she said she must go.
They importuned her to accompany them to the Folsom House to dinner, but she would not consent. Then her father insisted that she should have a hack, but she refused that strenuously. They walked together some distance.
"Arrangements must be made to-morrow morning," her father said authoritatively. She felt as if she had been metamorphosed into some other person. Laverne Westbury! it made her shiver. She liked the old personality so much better. Must she go away? This was all the real home she had ever known, this strange, odd, ever-changing Old San Francisco. Why, over here there was a row of tents when they first came. And the queer little one-room and two-room adobe houses, and the tangled-up streets that ended at some one's house. How plainly she could see it all!
She began to climb the hill wearily. Then some one came to meet her, helped her tenderly over the rough places. They did not pause at the house, but took the winding path up to the pine tree that grew more beautiful every year, with its shining needles and gray-green, fuzzy buds, almost like little kittens rolling and tumbling in the wind. Balder the beautiful was resting here. Here Victor had really said good-by to her. Why, Victor was in London. And suddenly London seemed to emerge from the gloom of the Tower, and the execution of King Charles and a hundred other melancholy reminiscences.
"Laverne!" her uncle began.
"Oh, I know! I know! They both came to school. They told me everything. But I shall not go. Do you think I could be so ungrateful, so heartless now in all this trouble? And I love you. It is years of love between us, and only a few weeks with them. Oh, no, no!"
There was a long silence. A vireo came and sang his merry lilt in the tree overhead. The fog and a good deal of the smoke had cleared away, and the sun was shining.
He was very glad of the love. It would comfort him all the rest of the weary way.
"Listen, child," he said at length, and he went carefully over the ground. The strongest point of all was that the law would give her to her father the next four years. And now he would have to start in anew and make another fortune. "I am not too old," he declared, with a little pride.
A word had caught her, just as one catches a ball with a chain at careless throw.