“I knew you would be intelligent enough to see the absurdity of the story, and kind enough not to hound that poor girl with the rest. I feel for her very deeply. My strong attachment to Richard Tremaine since our university days and the kindness of the Tremaines to my stepmother and her daughter has touched me deeply. The thought of the grief and mortification this story might bring to them is very painful to me.” Mrs. Charteris, being a woman, suspected that there were other reasons than the attachment to Richard Tremaine and Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine’s kindness which accounted for Isabey’s interest in Angela. The novel thought pierced her mind that it was possible for a man to feel a deep personal and secret interest in a married woman, but he must be a very peculiar man, thought Mrs. Charteris, for she had never known such a thing to be in Virginia. She looked at Isabey, therefore, with new interest, and concluded that the French Creoles were very different from the Virginians. “Now,” she said triumphantly, “you must have snack.” Isabey gracefully submitted, and drank a couple of glasses of blackberry wine, and ate some cakes with coriander seeds in them and sweetened with molasses, handed by the successor of the ex-plowman. When Isabey was leaving, Mrs. Charteris went with him out upon the porch and pointed to a great snow-covered field which the year before had been down in clover and which another season would grow cotton. She uttered at the same time the axiom of the whole South: “As long as we can raise cotton we can whip the North. Cotton is king!” Isabey returned to Harrowby uncertain whether or not Angela had an ally in Mrs. Charteris. After a month of storm and snow and sleet, Nature smiled once more. The days grew long, the sun shone with the ardor of spring, and under the melting snow the first tender shoots of grass made a bold stand. Isabey watched for the first time the drama of the development of the garden--a drama interpreted by Angela. On a still, sunny March day he limped up and down the garden path with Angela, who talked with lips and eyes to him. She examined the tracks her little feet made along the path and laughed at them. “You see,” she said, “I am wearing a pair of new shoes made by Uncle Mat, the shoemaker who makes for the servants. I haven’t had any new shoes for more than a year, not since the war began. So I had Uncle Mat make me a pair in order to save my best shoes for the time when I shall go to Neville. Uncle Mat can’t sew shoes--he only pegs them; and see what funny marks the pegs leave in the damp ground.” Isabey looked at the tracks of the clumsy little shoes, but not even Uncle Mat could wholly disguise the high-bred beauty of Angela’s feet.