"I love you, Nora," he stammered roughly. "I love you with my life and soul and body, but if your happiness required it I would give you up—to your people——"
"Wolff!" she interrupted passionately.
"Listen, dear. I am not talking at random. I have thought it all over. If I cannot make you happy, I will not make you unhappy. I will do everything a man can do to atone for the one great wrong. Only tell me, whilst I have the strength to part with you——"
He stopped again, and she felt that he was trembling. There was something infinitely pathetic in his weakness, something which called to life not only her love for him as her husband but a wealth of a new and wonderful tenderness such as a mother might feel for a suffering child. She put her arms about him and drew his head against her breast. For that moment she forgot everything save that he was miserable and that she had made him so.
"I will never leave you of my free will," she said. "Never! You will have to chase me away, and then I shall come and sit on the doorstep and wait for you to let me in. Oh, Wolff, my dearest, what foolish things have you been thinking, and how long have you been brooding over them? Don't you know that I could not live without you?"
He lifted his face, searching hers with keen, hungry eyes, in which she read doubt and a dawning hope.
"Is that true, Nora?"
"Yes; it is true!"
"Be honest with me. Am I so much to you that you can be happy with me—with my people and in my home and country?"
He had asked the question which she had asked herself in moments of pitiless self-examination, but, like her, he asked it too late. She answered now earnestly, passionately, swept beyond all selfish considerations on a tide of deep, sincere feeling.