Page:The Valley of Adventure (1926).pdf/174

 The mission padres were sparing of their windows, probably owing to the scarcity of glass, perhaps due to some more remote reason of their own. Their interiors were gloomily melancholy, out of keeping with their airy arches and white-plastered outer walls. The Mission San Fernando was an over-built establishment; it never had developed up to the plans made for it by Padre Lasuen, its founder. The western end of the long building, impressive in dimensions even in comparison with the great structures of the modern city which has grown out of the old pueblo where Comisionado Felix strutted his brief day, was at this time used for the storage of grain, and other products of the fields, At an early period the women neophytes had been locked there at night to keep them from temptation: later the king's soldiers had been quartered in the vast apartment where Tula Sinova held her sewing classes; the marks of their heavy boots were in the soft red tiling of the floor.

This bright autumn morning, when the scarred hills seemed to have drawn so near that one could have called greeting to the shepherds in the little green canyons with their flocks, the old barracks room was as cheerful as sunlight and youth could make it, and there is no illumination in all the devices of men that can reach so far into the heart as these. Juan Molinero felt the gushing of a great happiness, when he stood looking in at the open door.

Tula Sinova was all in white, like an evening