“Is Neville ill,” asked Angela, adding, after a moment, “or dead?”
“Not as far as I know,” answered Isabey. “This has nothing to do with Neville’s well-being.”
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?”