"But Nora knew, and she never said a word, never even tried to stop him; and when I said that I thought it was very bad manners to make fun of people whose hospitality one had enjoyed, she flared up and said that her brother was English, and that English people had different ways, and couldn't help seeing the funny side of things—she saw them herself!"
Seleneck got up and paced about restlessly. The matter was more serious than he thought, and an instinctive wisdom warned him that for the present at any rate it would be better to keep his troubles about Wolff to himself.
"I wonder what is the matter with them all?" he said at last. "Of course, the brother is simply an ill-behaved cub, but I confess I do not understand Frau von Arnim. She was always so amiable, and everybody thought Wolff the luckiest fellow alive—except myself."
"I can tell you exactly what is the matter," his wife said more calmly and with some shrewdness, "Marriage, after all, doesn't work miracles, and Frau von Arnim is no more German than I am Chinese. She is English right to the core, and at the bottom of everything she despises and hates us and our ways. They are not good enough for her any more, and she wants to go back to her own life and her own people. It was all right so long as she was alone with Wolff in the first few months. One didn't notice the gulf so much, but now she has her brother to remind her and support her, it will widen and widen. See if what I say is not true!"
"It's a very bad outlook for poor Wolff if it is true," Seleneck said gloomily. "He is absolutely devoted to her."
"Nevertheless, it will end badly," his wife answered, preparing to make her departure. "It is I who tell you so. Race and nationality are dividing oceans, and the man who tries to bridge them is a fool, and deserves his fate."
And with these words of wisdom she disappeared into the mysterious region of the kitchen.
CHAPTER VIII
RISING SHADOWS
Nora sat by the window and mended stockings. There was not very much light, for although it was still early afternoon and the winter sun stood high in the heavens, very few rays found their way into the fourth-floor rooms of No. 22, Adler Strasse. As Miles had said more than once, it was a poky hole. Nora remembered his words as she worked, and she looked up and studied the tiny apartment with a wondering regret. Yes; it was dark and poky; but why did the fact strike her so clearly and so constantly? Why was she doomed to see everything and everybody with another's eyes? For that was what had happened to her. One short month ago, this place had been her paradise, her own particular little Eden, and now it was a "poky hole"—because Miles had said so and because her common sense told her that he was right. Had, then, the magic which had blinded her against the reality ceased to act its charm—or altogether lost its power? Surely not. Her eyes fell on her husband's writing-table, with its burden of neatly arranged books and papers, and something in her softened to wistful tenderness. In her imagination she saw him sitting there, bent over his work in all-absorbed interest. She saw the thoughtful, knitted brows, the strong white hand guiding the pen through the intricacies of plans and calculations, the keen, searching eyes which were never stern for her, which, if they no longer flashed with the old unshadowed laughter, were always filled with the same unshaken, unaltered love. And she in her turn loved him. That she knew. There, and there alone, her brother's barbed shafts had fallen short, or had broken harmless against the steeled walls of defence. Her husband was still what he had always been—the one and only man who had ever counted in her life. But there was a difference. What the difference was she could not tell. Perhaps just that change had come into her love which had come into his eyes. It was still a great love, still unshaken, but it had lost the power of glorying in itself, of being happy, of rejoicing in its own strength and youth and unity. When Wolff entered the room her pulses quickened, but it was with a curious, inexplicable pain, and when he went away she breathed more easily. That most wonderful and rare of moments when they had thought and felt and lived as though they were one mind, one body, one soul had passed—perhaps for ever. They stood on different shores and looked at each other over the dividing stream with sad eyes of love and hopeless regret.