How had it all come? Whose fault was it? Poor Nora felt she knew. The spectre had risen in the same hour when Miles had leant back in the Drotschke and sighed with relief because Wolff had not accompanied them. She had been angry at first, but the rough words had revealed something to her which she would never otherwise have believed, something in herself which had lain dormant and which now awoke, never to rest again. It was not Miles's fault. Had it been, she would not have hesitated to follow her mother's advice. But to have sent him away would be a sign of weakness—and it would be useless. The evil—whatsoever it was—lay in herself. It had always been there, but she had not recognised it. Miles had shown her what she must sooner or later have seen for herself. She had married a stranger from a strange land, and he had remained a stranger, and the land had not become her home. That was the whole matter. That she loved him, that his country had offered her love and welcome did not alter the one great fact that the faintest cry, the faintest call from her own people had drawn from her an irrepressible answer of unchanged allegiance. She loved Wolff, but in every petty conflict between him and her brother her heart had sided against him; she had had a sincere affection for the Selenecks, and in cold blood she knew that Miles had behaved boorishly towards them; but she had grown to hate them because they had shown their disapproval, and because he hated them.
In this strange, unseen conflict of influences Miles stood for more than her brother; he stood for her whole race, for every inborn prejudice and opinion, and his coming had revealed to her her own loneliness. She was alone in a foreign land; she spoke a tongue which was not her tongue; she lived a life in which she was, and must remain, a tolerated stranger. Her seeming compliance had been no more than youth's adaptability to a passing change. Her love and her ready enthusiasm had blinded her, but Miles had torn down the scales from her eyes, and she saw the life she lived as he saw it—as a weary round of dismal pleasures, big sacrifices, endless struggle. She saw that her home was poor and tasteless, that her friends were neither elegant nor interesting, that they had other ideas, other conceptions of things which to Nora were vitally important—that they were, in a word, foreigners to her blood and up-bringing.
It had been a terribly painful awakening, and in her desperate flight from the full realisation of the change in her she had broken through the circle which hedged in her life, and sought her escape on the turbulent sea of another, more gilded society. She had tried to intoxicate herself with the splendour and popularity so easily acquired. The Frau Commerzienrat Bauer had received her with open arms, had showered upon her delicate and sometimes indelicate attentions; she had been fêted at the gorgeous entertainments given in her honour at the over-decorated "palatial residence"; she had seen Miles's expression of contemptuous criticism change for one of admiration, herself surrounded by the adulation of men who, she was told, governed the world's finance; she had heard the Frau Commerzienrat's loud voice proclaim her as "My dear friend, Frau von Arnim"—and at the bottom of her heart she had been nauseated, disgusted, wearied by it all. She had come back to the close and humble quarters of her home with a sweet sense of its inner purity and dignity, with the determination to make it the very centre of her life. And then she had seen her husband's grave—as it seemed to her, reproachful—face, the freezing disapproval of his circle, the mocking satisfaction of her brother; and the momentary peace had gone. She had felt herself an outcast, and, in hot, bitter defiance of the order of things against which she had sinned, had returned thither, where the opium flattery awaited her. But through it all she loved her husband, desperately, sincerely. As she sat there bent over her work, she thought of him in all the glamour of the first days of their happiness, and a tear rolled down her cheek, only to be brushed quickly away as she heard his footstep on the corridor outside.
"How tired he sounds!" she thought, and suddenly an immense pity mingled with the rekindling tenderness, and shone out of her eyes as she rose to greet him, like a reflex from earlier days.
He looked tired to exhaustion. The rim of his helmet had drawn a deep red line across his broad forehead, and there were heavy lines under the eyes. Nevertheless, his whole face lit up as he saw her.
"May I come in, Nora?" he asked, with a glance at his dusty riding-boots. "We have been surveying, and I am not fit for a lady's drawing-room; but if I tiptoed——"
"Of course you may come in," she cried cheerfully, thankful that the light was behind her. "I have been waiting for you, and tea is quite ready. Sit down, and I will bring you a cup."
He obeyed willingly, and followed her with his eyes as she bustled around the room. It was like old times to find her alone, to see her so eager to attend to his wants. When she came to him with his cup he drew her gently down beside him, and she saw that his face was full of tender gratitude.
"You kind little wife!" he said. "It's worth all the fatigue and worry just to come back and be spoilt. What a long time it seems since we were alone and since you 'fussed' over me, as you used to call it."
There was no reproach or complaint in his voice, and yet she felt reproached. She lifted her face to his and kissed him remorsefully.