This thought had followed Isabey and pierced him as he marched and fought and starved through blistering days of heat and biting days of cold, through summer’s miasma and winter’s snows and storms of sleet and hail. It had torn his heart when he saw gaps in the thin gray lines filled up with tottering old men and white-faced boys, half-fed with miserable rations, half-clothed in rags and remnants, wholly unshod, but with musket barrels bright and ever ready to answer the order to advance. It was impossible that such sacrifices, such valor, should be in vain, and it came to Isabey in a great flood of illumination that the compensation would be the sweeping away of the everlasting blight, the deadening contamination of slavery. This thought comforted him a little, and he turned from the graves of his friends again to the footpath which would lead him toward Angela. The only sounds he heard were his own quiet footsteps along the stubble path and the breathing of his tired horse trudging patiently behind him. As he came to the opening in the yew hedge the realization of his dream was suddenly before him. Angela was coming toward him slowly up the broad garden walk in the veiled brilliance of the spring afternoon. The horse, understanding the command of silence, having had time and circumstance enough to instill it into him, obeyed a touch from Isabey’s hand and remained motionless. Isabey, standing a little behind the yew hedge, had time to study Angela’s face as she came close to him, her eyes fixed upon the ground. She was dressed all in black, and around her was thrown a black mantle, the mantle which had once been a splendid crimson, but which had been dyed to the garb of widowhood. As her habit was, her head was bare, and the vagrant wind toyed with the little waving locks upon the white nape of her neck. As the case often is, Isabey’s recollection of her had gone back to their first meeting, four years before, and he expected to see her still a girl, with a girl’s eyes. She had retained her maiden slimness, but otherwise the great change had come from childhood to womanhood. The delicately haughty poise of her head, the laughing defiance of her upward glance were gone forever. Instead of these was an air soft and appealing, a movement gentle in contrast with the quick grace, like the swallow’s flight, which Isabey had often noted and admired in days gone by. In holding her mantle around her she crossed her hands upon her breast, and it gave her a nunlike sweetness and meekness which Isabey had never seen in her before. As she reached the end of the walk she paused for a moment, and, looking upward at the opaline sky of the west in which great clouds of green and amber were changing to violet, turned and walked again to the end of the garden path. She was quite near the old bench under the lilac bushes before she heard a footstep behind her. Isabey put out his hand, and, taking hers, said: “Let us sit once again where we parted.”