Isabey replied with truth that in lowland Virginia one might live like a lord as long as the sun rose and the rivers ran.
At three o’clock the Christmas dinner was served, and around the great mahogany table gathered a group smaller than it had ever held before—Colonel Tremaine, Lyddon, Angela, and Isabey for a part of the time. The dinner was rich in oysters, fishes, meats, and vegetables, but deficient in sweets. When, according to the old custom, the cloth was removed and the decanters on coasters were sent around the table, Colonel Tremaine proposed the Christmas toast to “our absent ones—the lady who reigns over this mansion and also over the heart of its master, to its sons—” here he paused.
Angela said in a quick, tremulous voice, “Neville, Richard, and Archie.”
Colonel Tremaine’s face darkened. The mention of his traitor son, as he regarded Neville, was always painful to him, but he did not refuse to drink the toast.
When the dinner was over the short wintry afternoon was closing in. Snow was again falling heavily in a world already wrapped in whiteness and silence. There were no sounds of merrymaking from the negro quarters. All seemed to share the mood of tenseness and somber expectation.
Colonel Tremaine was visibly depressed. It was the first Christmas he had spent in forty years apart from Mrs. Tremaine and he felt it deeply.
As the twilight closed in, Angela, wrapped in her red mantle, with the hood over her head, went out into a misty world of snow and faint moonshine, which penetrated a break in the overhanging clouds. A pathway had been cut through the snow to the garden gate and thence down the main walk to the old brick wall at the end. Angela began to pace up and down her favorite walk. Her sense of aloneness and aloofness was complete. The swirling white eddies shut everything from her except the bare shrubs in the garden standing like ghosts in the faint spectral glare of the moon on a snowy night.
She began to question herself. Would she, if she were entirely free to act, go at once to Neville? She answered her own question and satisfactorily. Certainly she would. Did she love Neville? Yes, just as she had always done, from the time she was a little girl and never felt so safe with anyone as when her tiny hand lay in Neville’s boyish palm. Was she in love with him? Ah, no! And would she ever be? To that, too, her heart gave no doubtful answer, but a strong negative. She was never to have a dream of love, any of those soft illusions which make a young girl’s heart tremble.
Then relentlessly she asked herself if she was in love with Isabey. She stopped in her walk and looked about her with scared eyes, as if love were a specter to affright her. She was enveloped in the misty veil of the falling snow which eddied about her and which was lighted by that ghostly and silvery sheen of the hobgoblin moon.
Did she not feel the color come to her face whenever she caught Isabey’s eyes fixed upon her? Did not her heart beat at his footsteps, and did not his mere presence electrify the atmosphere?