“You must not be offended with me now for anything I say. I’m so weak in body that it affects my will. I often found myself when I was lying on the floor of that wretched hut asking the doctor for things which I knew in advance he could not have supplied to save his life. Be patient with a man who doesn’t know very well how to bear pain of any sort.” What woman could resist that? Angela said nothing, but her eyes spoke forgiveness. [Illustration: “He lay watching Angela with her quick-changing expression.”] Then she opened the book and began to read. Her reading was good and her understanding of the lines perfect. Isabey knew them well, and their far-off, half-forgotten music fell softly upon his spirit. He lay watching Angela with her quick-changing expression, her easy and graceful attitude. It was all so sweetly, divinely peaceful, and then before he knew it his eyes closed and he slept. Angela read on, the music of her voice filling the low, small room. She did not put down the book until Isabey slept soundly. Then she watched him with her heart in her eyes. If he had returned well and strong and full of the charm, the grace, the captivations, the splendid accomplishments which had so dazzled her at their first meeting, she would have been on her guard. But who need be on her guard, she asked herself, with a wounded soldier, a man as helpless as a child, and who was entitled to have all things made soft and easy for him? And how ashy white he looked, the whiter from the blackness of his hair! In his sleep he moved his right arm and groaned without waking. Angela rose and, changing the position of his arm a little, Isabey moaned no more. The silence in the room was broken only by his light breathing and the occasional dropping of a coal upon the ashes. Without was that deep and dreamlike silence of overwhelming snow. It seemed to Angela as if not only the face of the world but all the people in it had changed within the year. The Christmas before she had never seen Isabey, but her mind working on the problem as women’s minds work, it seemed to her us if she had really known him ever since those days when as a little girl she saw the pictures of him taken with Richard. Her childish imagination had seized upon Isabey’s image with a sort of foreknowledge; she had been in love with him before she ever saw him. When this thought occurred to her, she reasoned with herself coolly. To be in love with a name, with a fanciful image even of a real man was not love. She had been in love with _Lara_, with _Childe Harold_, even some of those old Greek and Roman heroes whose names she had spelled out painfully when she was a child at Lyddon’s knee. However, one of these heroes--Isabey--had taken shape and had come bodily before her, and deep down in her heart, this airy romance, this thing of dreams had become something real and menacing to her happiness.