k so, but I know it will be more beautiful for me,"
he answered. "That imported young lady, with all those elegant fixings,
sort of jarred with the Mission architecture, to my mind."

Angela hoped that her laugh was not cattish. "But I'm imported, too," she
said. "Shall I jar on you at San Miguel?"

"You're _not_ imported!" Nick dared to contradict her. "Or, if you are,
you're the kind there oughtn't to be any duty on."

A rain of sunset colour poured over mountains, hills, and meadows as Nick
turned his car toward San Miguel. When they came in sight of the old
Mission (built far from the Springs because of hostile Indians), the
changing lights were like an illuminated fountain. At last, when they
began to fade, Angela said, "Let us go. If we stay longer we shan't
remember this at its best."

She would have been surprised if she had known what happiness there was
for Nick in the word "we," spoken as she often spoke it now: "We" must do
this; "We" mustn't forget that.

But it was a blow when she asked Billy, the chauffeur, if he would like to
see the Mission. "Nothing can hurt the car," she said; "and when we come
back it will be too late."

Nick was tempted to glare a warning and suppress the youth's interest in
objects of historical value: but he refrained. Billy must not get it into
his head that there was "anything going on." So the chauffeur was allowed
to follow Nick and Angela as they wandered, so it seemed to him,
sentimentally about the big Mission enclosure, between crumbling adobe
walls where the Franciscan Fathers had sheltered cattle in nights of
peace, and Indians in nights of danger. Billy could not feel the pathos of
the place--desolate, yet impressive in its simplicity; but as he
sauntered about, his hands in his pockets, whistling beneath his breath,
"I can't marry you!" his smart little modern mind began to work. The
strategic value of the position appealed to him, and he saw why "those old
Johnnies," as he irreverently styled the Padres, had planted the Mission
here. "Guess they knew their business 'most as well as if they'd been
soldiers," he said to himself.

Billy found pleasure in picturing the massacres which must have taken
place, imagining the great doors of the enclosure opened hastily to let in
an escaping band of "friendlies"; then the bursting in of the enemy, and
the death of the Fathers as they tried to protect their Indian children.
Many had died by fire and tomahawk, but always o