David Westbury drove his wife and pretty daughter about with a proud, satisfied air. Agnes shopped for her, "just enough to make her presentable," she said when Laverne protested. But, after all, the parting was very hard.
"You must not come and see me off, Uncle Jason." She could not renounce the dear, familiar name. "If you did, I should give one wild leap and land on the wharf, and you would have to keep me. Four years—it's a long, long while, and there will be room for a great many heartaches in it, but one day they will be healed."
He obeyed her, and did not come. There were many friends who did. So she went sailing out of the Golden Gate on as fair a day as she had first entered it. Oh, how the sun shone and tipped the waves with molten gold. Never were skies bluer. Even the rocks, and the clefts, and the crannies brought out their indescribable colors, browns that deepened through every shade into purple and black, grays that were pink and mauve and dun, blues that ran into sapphire, and green and chrysoprase. Telegraph Hill and the old, time-worn semaphore. Oh, farewell, farewell, dear old San Francisco!
There was some trouble getting insurance matters straightened up and paying debts. Jason Chadsey had lost the spring of ambition and life. He would take a voyage up north with some of the explorers, then he would think of the next thing. Four years. Oh, no, she would never return. The bright, laughing, gay world would swallow her up.
Marian Holmes pitied the man profoundly through this time. They had been excellent, sensible friends. There had been two or three occasions when she would have married him if he had been really in love with her. She knew now why his love-day had passed. She enjoyed her own life, her own neat ways, her liberty. She and Miss Gaines were still very warm friends, and the latter would have liked her to come with her.
"I have a fancy to try it at Oaklands, and help Americanize these charming people, perhaps spoil them. It will be very easy and delightful. The daughter will be a rather curious study. If she were poor, she would have a fortune in her voice. She has quite a gift of poetry. I shall try to keep her from morbidness and a convent, now that she has lost her friend. And her mother wants her fitted for marriage. How these foreigners harp on that!" laughing a little.
Laverne Westbury cried herself to sleep many a night, though in the daytime she took a warm interest in all about her, and tried to be agreeable, tried to draw near to her father. He was proud of her prettiness, of her refined ways, the delicacy that had come down to her from the New England strain. It was English, and she would "take" over there. Then he was glad to have Agnes so happy. It was like a girl with her first doll. Often Laverne would rather have been left alone, but she tried not to be ungracious.
They crossed the Isthmus, quite a new experience. They went up to Washington, where David Westbury had an excellent scheme to exploit that did get taken up afterward. Then to Liverpool. The little girl never dreamed there would come a time when one could cross the continent in a week, the ocean in another, and her father's expectations seemed quite wild to her.
There was a visit over to Paris. Eugénie was at the height of her popularity, but now she had to take a little pains with her beauty. Still she was the mother of a future Emperor, she was a favorite daughter of the Church, she set the fashions and the manners of the day and did it most admirably.
It was not possible for a girl to be unhappy or cry herself to sleep amid such charming surroundings. Her French was very useful, she had been so in the habit of using it at home that she did not take it up awkwardly.