"Paso Robles means 'Pass of the Oaks,'" said Nick, as they came into a stretch of billowing country where immense trees shadowed the summer gold of meadows.
"Shall we go first to the Mission of San Miguel?" Nick asked. "Or are you tired, and shall I take you to the hotel now?"
"I'm not tired," said Angela. She did not want this day to end yet.
"We'll hit the trail for the Mission, then," said Nick, "and see the sunset, as we did from Santa Barbara."
"Can this be as beautiful?" Angela asked. "Surely not?"
"You, maybe, won't think 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.