Angela, in a way, was as novel to Isabey as he was to her. He had never, under the social customs in New Orleans, been thrown into a close and unguarded intimacy with any woman as with her. Her heart and mind had been like a volume of poetry open before him, and he had read on, pleased, touched, amused, reverencing, and surprised. She knew so much in some ways and so little in others. The thing of which she knew least, but could feel most, was love. If she had possessed more guile or even more knowledge of herself, she would never have slipped into that soft, sweet intercourse with Isabey. All of them, the whole Harrowby family, were the most guileless people that Isabey had ever known. The mere saying of the words which made Angela the wife of Neville Tremaine on the wharf that April night at Harrowby was confidently felt, not only by the Harrowby family, but by the whole community, to put her definitely and forever out of the reach of any other man than her husband. Such a thing as a flirtation with a married woman had never been heard of among those patriarchal people. They had never known anything between the perfect dignity of a wife and the bottomless pit of degradation into which, once in a hundred years, a woman sometimes fell to be lost forever in the abyss. “Wherever divorce is unknown, and the honor of women is protected by men with arms in their hands, this state of society must result,” thought Isabey, as he plodded along through the rain back to his tent, and he would be the last person in the world to wish this unwritten law changed. He would rather have died than speak a word of open love to Angela. But love speaks without words, and to people more worldly-wise than these simple Virginian country gentry Isabey’s secret might have been suspected long ago. When he reached his tent he rolled himself in his blanket and lay down in the darkness, not to sleep, but to dream, to think, to suffer torments. The waking hours of a night are usually long, but when the rosy dawn crept in, Isabey thought it was the shortest night he had ever spent. The October morning was of an exquisite softness. The Indian summer had come, that time of mellow sunshine, of faint blue mists upon the uplands, of caressing winds among the fading leaves when summer turns back, as it were, for a last farewell. Old Euripides said, in the long ago, “In all fair things, the autumn, too, is fair.”