Angela looked at him with wide eyes of amazement. “To take me to my husband,” she said, after a moment. “You? It is very strange, most strange.” “But you are not unwilling to go?” Angela hesitated, and the color dropped out of her face, leaving her deathly pale. All at once her whole heart seemed revealed to her. Once set forth upon her journey to join her husband meant separation, an eternal separation, from Isabey. He watched her, reading easily the meaning of her pallor and tremors, and understanding equally well her quick recovery of herself, the calm courage, and even high spirit, with which she replied: “Certainly it is my wish as well as my duty to join my husband; but why you, I can’t understand--” Nor could Isabey, his eyes fixed upon Angela’s pale face, understand either why he should be the instrument to put the coming degradation upon her, and be, as it were, the executioner of his own happiness--that faint and shadowy happiness which a man enjoys in the presence of the woman he loves but who is irrevocably beyond his reach. Then Angela, without waiting for a reply to her first question, asked: “Where shall I meet my husband?” “That I can’t tell you. We can reach him by military telegraph as soon as we are within the Federal lines.” “Are those my husband’s directions?” “No,” said Isabey, taking out his white handkerchief and passing it over his face, on which Angela’s fixed glance noticed drops were standing. “Then what are my husband’s directions? Why has he not informed me?” To this Isabey made no reply; but his agitation, although well mastered, could not be wholly concealed. Angela rose to her feet, and Isabey rose also. Facing each other, she said to him in a voice which she vainly endeavored to make calm: “There is some mystery about this which must be explained to me. Tell me the truth, and tell me all the truth.” There was no gainsaying this, and Isabey, unconscious that he called her by her first name, replied: “Angela, since you command me, I must tell you the truth. There is a cruel and most unjust suspicion abroad against you. The people in the county think and say that you are conveying information from the Confederate side to your husband.” Angela straightened up her slender figure and smiled contemptuously. “Is that all?” she asked. “Then it is very easily disproved. What do I know about military matters? Who speaks of them before me? If I told all I knew, or have ever known, it would be nothing.”