Isabey had come no more; he remained in camp, going about his duties with unswerving regularity but without cheerfulness, and was restless at the surgeons’ prohibition against his going to the front for some months to come. There was plenty of work for him to do, but, like most men with a gnawing pain in the heart, Isabey wanted action, action, action to drive away the specter of his lost love, which had for him all the power of the first love and the last. He remembered with a grim smile his early infatuation for Adrienne, which was so natural as to be almost inevitable. He recalled that he made verses in those days and set them to music and sang them to Adrienne. He could not have made a verse about Angela to save his life, and concluded that when men could write, as did Petrarch, Tasso, and Dante Alighieri, of a wrecked passion, it could not have hurt very much. He recalled that Paolo had not written a line about Francesca, and it seemed to him that the tragic love of those two poor souls was paralleled in his own case. For, put it away as he might, he could not deny to himself that Angela’s heart had struck an answering chord to his. He reasoned with himself that it would have been too much happiness if Angela had been free to marry him: but at least he had what was next best and a million times better than what falls to the lot of most dwellers upon the earth--the full and perfect confidence, the completest sympathy and understanding, with the only woman he had ever loved. He remembered the ancient saying that each mortal has so much of the wine of life given to him, sweet or bitter, strong or weak, and the goblet may be of gold or of base metal. He concluded that his share was strong and bitter, but it was served to him in a golden goblet. There was a species of lofty flattery on Angela’s part in the perfect confidence with which she treated him. She had not hesitated to spend long hours alone with him in the old study during the month when they were snowbound; and Isabey reckoned those hours as spent in the Elysian Fields of the soul. In the beginning he had tried to put her image from him, as the normal man of gentlemanly instincts does concerning the wife of his friend; but after that month when Angela had tended him and eased his wounds of body and laid the soft spell of her constant presence upon him, the thought of her would not vanish away. It was easy enough to keep her name out of his speech or even when he spoke it to do so quite naturally, but to banish her sweet image--ah, no man who loved as Isabey could do that. Each night when he slept the sleep of exhaustion after a day of hard work in his regimental duties some faint dream of Angela would pass through his sleep.