Whatever she or Isabey might suffer, Neville’s heart should be at peace. She would be to him so tender, so affectionate, so watchful to please him, that he would never suspect she had not given him her whole treasure. And, feeling this, she had an expansion of the soul which seemed to raise her in her own esteem. Why need she be on her guard against Isabey? He had suffered so much. He was the object which most appeals to a woman’s heart--a wounded soldier. He was so weak, so worn, that no woman on earth could refuse him her pity. And of his integrity, his delicacy, she had not the smallest doubt. It seemed to her then so easy to be loyal both to the real and to the ideal. She resumed her walk in the swirling snow. At the same moment Isabey, lying on the couch in the study watching the pallid twilight of the snowstorm without and the rosy glow of the fire within, was asking himself some of the same questions which Angela put to herself in the storm-swept garden. Was he in love with this girl? Yes. And more, he loved her with all his heart. She was already the wife of a man whom he admired and honored; she was born among different surroundings from his own: bred differently from any girl he had ever known; of different blood and religion and customs to his own, and yet an unbreakable chain had been forged between them. The first circumstance of this was strange to him--Angela’s suddenly putting her hand in his that summer day, now six months past. He was accustomed to the French method of training girls, and here was Angela, who enjoyed even greater freedom than was usually accorded to those girls of colder climes than Louisiana. This wife of barely twenty was trusted as if she were a woman of sixty, and although this was new to Isabey, it touched and enlightened him. In place of Angela’s inexperience he had a thorough knowledge of the world; hence he did not adopt Angela’s innocent delusion that it would be easy to reconcile the real and the ideal. But for her, he would at some time or other have acquiesced in one of those marriages which are arranged with a view to fitness in every respect except the perfect union of hearts. Often this union came; Isabey was by no means prepared to condemn those methods concerning marriage which he had been accustomed to all his life. A conventional marriage, however, no longer was possible for him, but at least he could enjoy the month in paradise which had come to him out of the blue.