Along the Cliff Drive they went to the Hope Ranch, and Angela tried to think of the brave old days of the “Roaring Forties,” of barbecues, and wedding feasts for Spanish brides—­days when the business of life was to love, and laugh, and dance, and spend the money yielded by thousands of rolling acres.  According to the stories, all women had been beautiful, all men brave, and ready to fight for the ladies they loved; and though the world had changed since then, faster here than elsewhere, it seemed to her that at heart the men of America had kept to old traditions more closely than men in older countries.  Then she smiled at herself for this impression; for, after all, what did she know of American men?

When they turned at last, coming back toward the Mission, to which, somehow, all the rest had been leading up, the setting sun was beating the dusk into sparks of fire.

At first glimpse, alighting before the steps of the restored Mission church, Angela compared it unfavourably in her mind with the lovely shabbiness of San Gabriel.  She had a feeling that Santa Barbara the pleasure-place lived on Santa Barbara the Mission, with its history and romance.  But she had only to go inside to beg pardon of the church for her first impression.  It was easy to remember that there had never been the same stress of poverty here as among the missionary Fathers of San Gabriel, in the City of Angela.  Yet in this place, too, there was the same pathetic effect which had brought tears to Angela’s eyes in the dim little church at San Gabriel; an effect that once felt and understood, gives the old Spanish Missions their great, undying charm.  At Santa Barbara—­sweet name, ringing like the silver bells of the Franciscan Fathers—­as at San Gabriel, there had been the same striving to copy the noble designs and proportions of the Spanish cathedrals, visioned in spirit by the homesick monks, who knew well they would never see them with bodily eyes again.  With simple materials and unskilled Indian workers, these exiled men had striven to reproduce in the far, lonely West the architecture of the East, loved and lost by them forever.  The very simplicity of the church made its beauty.

[Illustration:  “Santa Barbara Mission, with its history and romance”]

The scar of Santa Barbara Mission had been patched up, while at San Gabriel the bandages were vines and flowers; but the sunset light lent to the cloisters all the stateliness and glory of some old monastery in Southern Spain; the octagonal fountain on the bare terrace dripped silver; and an embroidery of lichen had gilded the rose-coloured tiles of the sloping roof with all shades and tints of gold.  The sun, bidding good-bye to the day, gave back for an hour the splendour of the past.