"That is not true!" she stammered. "Nothing that you have said is true. I have not been dishonourable, and Miles——" She broke off because her conscience accused her, and a smile of bitterness passed over Frau von Arnim's pale features.
"Then all I can say is that English people must have an extraordinary sense of honour," she said.
Perhaps she regretted her own hasty words, but it was too late to recall them. A blank silence followed. Both felt that the straining bond between them had snapped and that they stood opposite each other like two people separated by an untraversable river.
Nora went to the door and from thence looked back at the proud figure of her adversary.
"You have no right to speak to me as you have done," she said in a voice that she strove in vain to steady. "What I do concerns no one but Wolff and myself, and I need not and shall not alter my life because of what you have said. You can do what you like—tell Wolff everything: I am not afraid. As to what you said about us—the English—it only proves what I already knew—you hate us because you envy us!"
And with this explosion of youthful jingoism she closed the door upon her last hope of help and comfort. But outside in the narrow, dusky hall she broke down. A strange faintness came over her, which numbed her limbs and senses and drew a veil before her eyes. A cry rose to her lips, and had that cry been uttered it might have changed the whole course of her life, sweeping down the barrier between her and the stern-faced woman by its very weakness, its very pitifulness. But she crushed it back and, calling upon the last reserves of her strength, went her way, too proud to plead for pity where she had already found judgment.
CHAPTER XII
WAR-CLOUDS
Nora had not seen Arnim the whole morning. He sat in his study with the door locked, and the orderly had injunctions to allow no one to disturb him. Nevertheless, towards midday a staff-officer was shown through the drawing-room into Wolff's sanctum, and for an hour the two men were together, nothing being heard of them save the regular rise and fall of their voices.
"What has the fellow come about?" Miles demanded in a tone of injury. "One would think they were concocting a regular Guy Fawkes plot, with their shut doors and their whisperings—or making plans for the Invasion."