“I hope so, if the occasion should come,” answered Angela. “But if I should hear that Neville were wounded he would not be dependent upon strangers. I should go to him whether he sent for me or not, or even if he sent me word not to come, still I should go.” Mrs. Tremaine turned away pale and silent, as she always was at the rare mention of her eldest-born. In a day or two letters arrived from Isabey, one to Colonel Tremaine and another to Angela. Lyddon brought them on a bright spring noontime from the post office, where there was an intermittent delivery of letters. She read the letter and then handed it to Mrs. Tremaine. It was graceful and cordial and full of gratitude. After being passed around it was returned to Angela. Half an hour afterwards Lyddon saw her walk across the lawn and down to where the river ran wine-colored in the old Homeric phrase. Angela’s right hand was closed, and as she reached the shore, lapped by the bright water, she opened her hand and dropped a hundred tiny bits of paper into the clear green-and-gold water, and stood watching them as they were tossed in the crystalline spray. “It is Isabey’s letter,” said Lyddon to himself. The orchestra of spring, as Angela had called it, was now playing gloriously, and it seemed to her as if the ice-bound winter were but a dream with all the beautiful unreality of a dream. She resolved to put Isabey out of her mind, but who ever yet put the thing beloved out of mind? All she could do whenever she thought of Isabey was to call up a passionate loyalty to Neville Tremaine and to make herself the most solemn of promises that never should any woman exceed her in the kindness, tenderness, devotion, consideration that she would give Neville Tremaine, not having the greater gift to bestow upon him. Isabey in a camp of five thousand men found plenty for a man to do who had not full use of his right arm and leg. His sanguine expectation of being able to join his battery in the field was not borne out. In riding he wrenched his arm painfully, which revived the whole trouble, and the doctors gave him no hope that his arm would sufficiently recover for him to rejoin his battery before the late autumn or early winter. Meanwhile the ugly suspicion against Angela, of which Mrs. Charteris had told him, came back in a hundred ways. It was undoubtedly true that information concerning the Confederates was mysteriously conveyed to the Federal commanders. The charge that Angela Tremaine had supplied this information was hinted at rather than spoken before Isabey. Once only had it been said outright--at the officers’ mess by a raw young lieutenant ignorant of most things. Isabey had turned upon him meaning to contradict the story in a manner as cool as it was convincing. But suddenly an impulse of rage seized him and before he knew it he had dashed a glass of water in the face of the offender.