When the dinner was over the short wintry afternoon was closing in. Snow was again falling heavily in a world already wrapped in whiteness and silence. There were no sounds of merrymaking from the negro quarters. All seemed to share the mood of tenseness and somber expectation. Colonel Tremaine was visibly depressed. It was the first Christmas he had spent in forty years apart from Mrs. Tremaine and he felt it deeply. As the twilight closed in, Angela, wrapped in her red mantle, with the hood over her head, went out into a misty world of snow and faint moonshine, which penetrated a break in the overhanging clouds. A pathway had been cut through the snow to the garden gate and thence down the main walk to the old brick wall at the end. Angela began to pace up and down her favorite walk. Her sense of aloneness and aloofness was complete. The swirling white eddies shut everything from her except the bare shrubs in the garden standing like ghosts in the faint spectral glare of the moon on a snowy night. She began to question herself. Would she, if she were entirely free to act, go at once to Neville? She answered her own question and satisfactorily. Certainly she would. Did she love Neville? Yes, just as she had always done, from the time she was a little girl and never felt so safe with anyone as when her tiny hand lay in Neville’s boyish palm. Was she in love with him? Ah, no! And would she ever be? To that, too, her heart gave no doubtful answer, but a strong negative. She was never to have a dream of love, any of those soft illusions which make a young girl’s heart tremble. Then relentlessly she asked herself if she was in love with Isabey. She stopped in her walk and looked about her with scared eyes, as if love were a specter to affright her. She was enveloped in the misty veil of the falling snow which eddied about her and which was lighted by that ghostly and silvery sheen of the hobgoblin moon. Did she not feel the color come to her face whenever she caught Isabey’s eyes fixed upon her? Did not her heart beat at his footsteps, and did not his mere presence electrify the atmosphere? Then another question forced itself into her mind, like a dagger into an open wound. Was Isabey in love with her? She had never thought or even suspected such a thing until he had returned, the pitiful wreck of his former self. But Angela being, like all the rest of her sex, learned in the secrets of the heart, had found out what Isabey in truth was too ill, too weak, to conceal--that she was dear to him. Had they met one week earlier! “But then,” she replied to herself, “it would have made no difference; I could not have refused to stand by Neville when all the world was arrayed against him.”