“You have a very pretty voice,” he said. “Why didn’t you keep on singing?”
“Because,” answered Angela in the same half-whisper, “I could do nothing but listen to your singing. I never heard anyone in my life sing so beautifully.”
Isabey smiled a little. “I am not particularly proud of the accomplishment,” he said. “I don’t care very much for singing men myself, and I have never taken singing very seriously since I was a youngster in Paris. Some day I will tell you how I was taught to sing.” Then after a pause he continued: “It is such a pleasure to me to see Tremaine again. We were chums, as you know, and lived together in Paris, and wore each other’s clothes and borrowed each other’s money for two years.”
“I know all about it,” she answered.
“And I should like to have seen Neville Tremaine, your husband. We were friends, too, although I never, of course, saw so much of him as of his brother.”
As Isabey said “your husband,” Angela shivered a little, and her color, which had returned again, went and left her pale. It suddenly occurred to her with the inexperience and radicalism of youth that it was wicked for her to take an interest in any man whatever other than Neville, and at the same moment it flashed upon her that nothing which Neville could say or do, that neither his coming nor going could affect her so powerfully as the coming of this stranger.
Her marriage remained to her an astounding and disorganizing fact which she could not wholly realize, but which made itself felt at every turn. It made it wrong for her, so she thought, to listen so eagerly and even breathlessly to Isabey, and yet she could not put from her his magnetic charm.
She was conscious also that nearly every man and certainly every woman in the congregation was surreptitiously watching her, and it seemed that in talking so interestedly with Isabey she was showing a want of dignity and feeling in the very face of her enemies, for so she reckoned every person in Petworth Church that day, except, perhaps, Mrs. Charteris.
In a quarter of an hour the rain ceased. The sun burst forth in noonday splendor, and the people on leaving the church went out into a world of green and gold and dripping diamonds.
Isabey, who had driven to church in the tavern keeper’s gig, thankfully accepted a seat in the Harrowby carriage. As the old coach jolted along the country road by green fields and through woodland glades, the whole world shining with sun and rain, Angela found herself listening with the same intensity to all Isabey said in his soft, rich voice.