“No—­no,” she murmured, smiling; “never—­ah, if I hadn’t come—­no, Van—­please—­” And then with a long breath she abandoned herself.

About midnight he left her at the door of her house on Golden Gate Avenue.  On their way home Ida had grown more serious than he had ever known her to be.  Now she began to cry softly to herself.  “Oh, Van,” she said, putting her head down upon his shoulder, “oh, I am so sorry.  You don’t think any less of me, do you?  Oh, Van, you must be true to me now!”

Chapter Six

Everybody in San Francisco knew of the Ravises and always made it a point to speak of them as one of the best families of the city.  They were not new and they were not particularly rich.  They had lived in the same house on California Street for nearly twenty years and had always been comfortably well off.  As things go in San Francisco, they were old-fashioned.  They had family traditions and usages and time-worn customs.  Their library had been in process of collection for the past half century and the pictures on the walls were oil paintings of steel engravings and genuine old-fashioned chromos, beyond price to-day.

Their furniture and ornaments were of the preceding generation, solid, conservative.  They were not chosen with reference to any one style, nor all bought at the same time.  Each separate piece had an individuality of its own.  The Ravises kept their old things, long after the fashion had gone out, preferring them to the smarter “art” objects on account of their associations.

There were six in the family, Mr. and Mrs. Ravis, Turner, and her older brother, Stanley, Yale ’88, a very serious young gentleman of twenty-seven, continually professing an interest in economics and finance.  Besides these were the two children, Howard, nine years old, and his sister, aged fourteen, who had been christened Virginia.

They were a home-loving race.  Mr. Ravis, senior, belonged to the Bohemian Club, but was seldom seen there.  Stanley was absorbed in his law business, and Turner went out but little.  They much preferred each other’s society to that of three fourths of their acquaintances, most of their friends being “friends of the family,” who came to dinner three or four times a year.

It was a custom of theirs to spend the evenings in the big dining-room at the back of the house, after the table had been cleared away, Mr. Ravis and Stanley reading the papers, the one smoking his cigar, the other his pipe; Mrs. Ravis, with the magazines and Turner with the Chautauquan.  Howard and Virginia appropriated the table to themselves where they played with their soldiers and backgammon board.