Neville, thinking he saw in Angela’s face and words and tone that a love for him, like his love for her, had been born in her soul, caught her to his breast in rapture. The hour passed so quickly to Neville it seemed as if they had but scarcely exchanged their first confidences when it was time for him to go.
He gave Angela his last instructions—to remain for at least three days, or until she should hear from him, at the little farmhouse where she had spent the night.
“I shall do exactly as you say,” answered Angela quietly. “And you may depend upon it that I shan’t fall into a panic and run away.”
“I know that you will never fall into a panic,” answered Neville, smiling. “I think the Southern women are very like the great captain who asked when he was a boy, ‘What is fear?’ I don’t think you know as much about fear as I do.”
Then, as the moment of parting approached, their voices and eyes grew grave, and presently Neville kissed Angela in the shade of the pine trees. They walked through the purple shadows of the late afternoon back to the road where the carriage still stood and the orderly led Neville’s horse up and down.
Farley, consumed with chagrin and impatience, still maintained a gentlemanlike outside. Neville thanked him with sincere gratitude, and Angela added some graceful phrases without taking any more interest in him than in the orderly, a fact which Farley bitterly realized. Neville put Angela in the carriage, and, laying a letter upon her lap, said to her:
“Good-by. Keep this letter, but do not open it unless you hear bad news of me. You will hear something from me within three days, in any event.”
Farley turned his back and the orderly looked hard in the opposite direction as Neville kissed Angela for the last time.
When a soldier says good-by it may be the last farewell. Angela’s heart was suddenly pierced with this thought, and when Neville would have turned quickly away, she drew him back to her and kissed him once again. The next moment he was gone.
The sun was setting when Angela found herself once more upon the road. It seemed to her as if that brief hour with Neville had been a dream; but all had been dreamlike with her of late. Until a year or so ago nothing had happened. That had been her grievance: she had so longed for life, movement, color, love, even grief, anything to move the silent pool in which she thought herself, at twenty, anchored for life.