They went into the church to rest. Madeleine had never taken any
interest in the history of her adopted state, and as they sat in a
pew at the back, surrounded by silence and a deep twilight gloom,
Masters told her the tragic story of Rezanov and Concha Arguello, who
would have married before that humble altar and the history of
California changed if the ironic fates had permitted. The story had
been told him by Mrs. Hathaway, who was the daughter of one of the
last of the grandees, and whose mother had lived in the Presidio when
Rezanov sailed in through the Golden Gate and Concha Arguello had
been La Favorita of Alta California.

The little church was very quiet. The rest of the world seemed far
away. Madeleine's fervid yielding imagination swept her back to that
long-forgotten past when a woman to whom the earlier fates had been
as kind as to herself had scaled all but the highest peaks of
happiness and descended into the profoundest depths of despair. Her
sympathies, enhanced by her own haunting premonition of disaster,
shattered her guard. She dropped her head into her hands and wept
hopelessly. Masters felt his own moorings shake. He half rose to
flee. But he too had been living in the romantic and passionate past
and he too had been visited by moments of black forebodings. Love had
tormented him to the breaking point before this and his ambition had
often been submerged in his impatience for the excess of work which
his newspaper would demand, exhausting to body and imagination alike.
He had long ceased to doubt that she loved him, but her self-command
had protected them both. He had believed it would never desert her
and when it did his pulses had their way. He took her in his arms and
strained her to him as if with the strength of his muscles and his
will he would defy the blundering fates.