There was a moment's silence. Arnim began to write with a studied calm.
"Your debts here will be paid on condition that you leave within forty-eight hours," he said. "I cannot do more for you. I only do that for Nora and for the sake of my own name."
Males leant forward over the table. He was not usually clever, but hatred had made him clever enough to take the most cruel weapon that lay within his reach.
"You talk as though I were such a beastly cad," he said, "but you shut your eyes to the other things that go on in the house. You are particular enough about your precious honour and name where I am concerned; but you let Arnold come into the house and make love to your wife without turning a hair."
"Miles, take care what you are saying!"
"I don't mind telling the truth. I have seen them——"
Wolff held up his hand, and there was something in the movement which checked the flood of malice and treachery and sent Miles back a step as though he had been struck.
"You can go," Wolff said quietly.
Again Miles wavered, torn between rage and cowardice. He hated this iron-willed martinet with his strait-laced principles and intolerable arrogance, but his fear was equal to his hatred, and after a moment he turned and slunk from the room.
Arnim went on writing mechanically. His brain—the steeled, highly trained brain—followed the intricate calculations before him with unchanged precision, but the man himself fought with the poison in his blood, and in the end conquered. As a strong swimmer he rose triumphant above the waves of doubt, suspicion, and calumny which had threatened him and held high above reach the shield of his wife's honour. It was all that was left him—his trust in her, his belief in her integrity. He knew that a crisis was at hand. With Miles's departure would come the moment in which Nora would have to make her choice between the home and people which he represented and her husband. How would she choose? The hope that had comforted him before seemed all too desperate. Family and country called her, and her love was the last frail bond which held her to him. Would it hold good? Had it not perhaps already yielded? Was she not already lost to him?