She maintained a strange reserve toward Angela, whom she had cradled in her arms, but at the end of a few days came to her with the same mysterious suggestion that a letter be written to Neville. Angela wrote again and dropped her letter out of the window as before. Next morning George Charteris brought over the news that the plowman butler at Greenhill had disappeared in the night for the Federal lines and half a dozen of the few remaining able-bodied negro men at Greenhill. Angela’s mind was illuminated. Mammy Tulip knew of these impending flights and was shrewd enough to see in them a means of communicating with Neville. That the scheme worked was soon shown by Angela’s receiving a fortnight later a reply from Neville, who was still in the West. It was given to her privately by Mammy Tulip. It bore the receiving postmark of the military post office at Yorktown and from there had been sent to its destination through hands unknown by Angela, but perfectly well known to Mammy Tulip. This secret communication with the outside world had in it something painful and disquieting to Angela. These servitors of another race, these feudal dependents whom she had been bred to believe absolutely devoted to the white family and to have no independent life of thought and action, had reversed all these beliefs. They had abandoned their masters, but not their own kith and kin, with whom they kept in touch secretly and silently. Angela spoke of this next day to Isabey when they sat as usual in the study, Angela reading to him. She had discovered in herself a strange inability to keep anything from Isabey. Her nature was frank and open, and she could reason well enough on what she should tell or withhold from Neville, but Isabey’s presence was a magic spell which seemed to unlock her heart and mind, and she could not keep from him her most secret thoughts. Isabey had learned to know the signs of Angela’s coming confidences, the way in which she would timidly approach a subject, and then as if by some uncontrollable impulse tell him all. He had been speaking of this departure of the negroes and of the dangers which would await them, in their ignorance and helplessness, exposed to the demoralization which infests all camps. In a moment Isabey saw that he had touched a sensitive chord. Angela laid down her book and going to the window looked out upon the dull wintry landscape. Isabey watched her with that sense of inward triumph which every human being feels who controls the will of another. In a minute or two she came back, and, standing before Isabey’s couch, said in a whisper: “Last night I had a letter from Neville. It came to me so mysteriously, not through Mr. Lyddon.” And then she poured out the story about Mammy Tulip. “I didn’t promise her not to tell,” Angela said breathlessly at the end, “for I must open my heart sometimes and I have no one--no one----”