"You said what you thought, and you lied," she said. "That is all that matters."
He drew aside with a stiff salute.
"I have apologised. I can do no more," he said, and turned on his heel.
Thus poor Nora toiled her way over the hard, frozen roads alone, her thin-shod feet aching, her heart beating to suffocation with anger and misery. But she was unconscious of pain or weariness. Her English pride, the high love of her land had risen like a tide and swept her forward—to what end she neither knew nor cared.
CHAPTER XIII
ULTIMATUM
"I do not know if I have done right in telling you," Frau von Arnim said. "I had not meant to do so, but circumstances—and Nora—have forced me. Had she offered me any reasonable explanation, or promised to put an end to her intimacy with this Captain Arnold, I should not have thought it necessary to speak to you on the matter. She chose to ignore my appeal and my advice, and I felt that there was no other course left open to me but to warn you and to give you my reasons for doing so."
"I am sure you meant it all for the best," Wolff answered. "All the same—I would rather have waited until Nora had told me herself."
He was standing by the window, and did not see the sceptical lifting of his aunt's eyebrows. She frowned immediately afterwards, as though annoyed at her own display of feeling.
"It would have been better," she admitted calmly; "but Nora is in a state of mind which does not encourage hope. I cannot help saying so, Wolff; she has changed very much since the Karlsburg days."