As she sat before the fire thinking these thoughts, Isabey waked without stirring. He had been dreaming of Angela and to find her close to him, her delicate profile outlined against the dark, book-covered walls, to hear the occasional rustle of her gown, and to watch her dark, narrow-lidded eyes in the gleam from the firelight, seemed to him a continuation of his soft and witching dream. He observed that her air and expression had matured singularly since he had first seen her, when the syringas bloomed, the lilacs were in their glory, and the blue iris hid shyly under its polished leaves, but outwardly Angela was not yet a woman any more than the little rose bushes of last year’s planting were rose trees now. The silence, the warmth, the sweetness seemed to enwrap Isabey, and without was that white and frozen world which made each homestead a solitude. He lay thus for half an hour furtively watching Angela. Then she turned toward him and met his dark eyes. “I thought you were asleep,” she said, stepping toward him. “I was asleep,” he replied, smiling, “and dreamed.” “Do you remember it is Christmas day?” she asked, arranging his pillows for him. “I believe I knew it, but I have not exerted myself to think since I have been under this roof. Everything is too deliciously sweet.” “It is the strangest Christmas,” said Angela, returning to her low chair. “Everything as quiet as death, not a sound in the house. I filled the stockings of all the little negro children with apples and nuts and molasses candy and gave them out early this morning. But I made them keep quiet for fear of waking you. They were quiet enough; something odd seems to have come over the negroes.” “I should think so. With their ignorance of events and inability to read and knowing neither geography nor history, don’t you suppose they must be secret excited and bewildered by this war, in which they have so huge a stake?” “So Mr. Lyddon says. Every one of them is different, it seems to me, since the war broke out, even Mammy Tulip and Uncle Hector. I don’t mean that they are not just as faithful, but they listen to us when we talk, and watch us, and I think repeat to each other what we say. I wonder how I shall feel when I go North to Neville and shan’t have any black people to wait upon me.” “You will feel very queer, I dare say. I never grew accustomed to being waited upon by white men all the time I was abroad. It is true that I had my own boy with me, but I often felt a yearning for the kindly negro faces, and longed to hear them laugh when they were spoken to.” While Angela and Isabey were talking, Colonel Tremaine came in. He had taken advantage of Mrs. Tremaine’s absence to array himself in a suit of before-the-war clothes, and was feeling much more at ease in them than in homespun, and so expressed himself.