Angela read on, the music of her voice filling the low, small room. She did not put down the book until Isabey slept soundly. Then she watched him with her heart in her eyes.
If he had returned well and strong and full of the charm, the grace, the captivations, the splendid accomplishments which had so dazzled her at their first meeting, she would have been on her guard. But who need be on her guard, she asked herself, with a wounded soldier, a man as helpless as a child, and who was entitled to have all things made soft and easy for him? And how ashy white he looked, the whiter from the blackness of his hair!
In his sleep he moved his right arm and groaned without waking. Angela rose and, changing the position of his arm a little, Isabey moaned no more. The silence in the room was broken only by his light breathing and the occasional dropping of a coal upon the ashes. Without was that deep and dreamlike silence of overwhelming snow. It seemed to Angela as if not only the face of the world but all the people in it had changed within the year.
The Christmas before she had never seen Isabey, but her mind working on the problem as women’s minds work, it seemed to her us if she had really known him ever since those days when as a little girl she saw the pictures of him taken with Richard. Her childish imagination had seized upon Isabey’s image with a sort of foreknowledge; she had been in love with him before she ever saw him.
When this thought occurred to her, she reasoned with herself coolly. To be in love with a name, with a fanciful image even of a real man was not love. She had been in love with Lara, with Childe Harold, even some of those old Greek and Roman heroes whose names she had spelled out painfully when she was a child at Lyddon’s knee.
However, one of these heroes—Isabey—had taken shape and had come bodily before her, and deep down in her heart, this airy romance, this thing of dreams had become something real and menacing to her happiness.
As she sat before the fire thinking these thoughts, Isabey waked without stirring. He had been dreaming of Angela and to find her close to him, her delicate profile outlined against the dark, book-covered walls, to hear the occasional rustle of her gown, and to watch her dark, narrow-lidded eyes in the gleam from the firelight, seemed to him a continuation of his soft and witching dream. He observed that her air and expression had matured singularly since he had first seen her, when the syringas bloomed, the lilacs were in their glory, and the blue iris hid shyly under its polished leaves, but outwardly Angela was not yet a woman any more than the little rose bushes of last year’s planting were rose trees now.
The silence, the warmth, the sweetness seemed to enwrap Isabey, and without was that white and frozen world which made each homestead a solitude. He lay thus for half an hour furtively watching Angela. Then she turned toward him and met his dark eyes.
“I thought you were asleep,” she said, stepping toward him.
“I was asleep,” he replied, smiling, “and dreamed.”