"You mean it was because of me?"
"Yes. Of course Frau von Arnim knows everything about—about the past, and she believes—oh, it is too horrid what she believes. We don't need to think about it. She has not told Wolff. If she had he would have turned me out of the house or locked me up in the cellar. None of them—not even he—can understand. Oh, Robert, you don't know how hard it was to have to send you away! You and Miles are the only people in all this big city to whom I can turn."
Arnold sat silent, staring in front of him. His pulses were beating with a growing, suffocating excitement. He knew by every tone of her voice, by every glance of her stormy, miserable eyes, that she was in his power, that he had but to make the appeal and she would follow him out of the room whithersoever he led her. The knowledge touched his steady-flowing blood with fever—in the same moment he was conscious of remorse and shame. He had lingered at her side against every behest of wisdom and honour, deceiving himself and her with an assumption of loyal, disinterested friendship. It was no friendship. Those who had judged it by another name had judged rightly. He had come between husband and wife, he was at that very moment, willingly or unwillingly, playing the part of tempter in the devil's comedy.
"Nora," he began, "perhaps I have done you harm. Perhaps I ought not to have come to-night."
"I don't care!" she retorted recklessly. "I don't care whether anything is right or wrong. When you came I was desperate. I hate every one here. It is awful to feel that I belong to them. I want to get away from here—home, to England."
"Nora—for God's sake!" He was frightened now—of her and of himself. "You must not talk like that. Your home is here with your husband."
"It is not!" she retorted, in the same low, trembling voice. "It is in England—it can never be anywhere else. Oh, you don't know what I suffer!"
"I can guess. Why don't you tell Wolff everything? Why don't you confide in him?"
Everything in him revolted against his own words. They were spoken, not out of innermost conviction, but as a stern tribute to his honour, and the principles which were bred into his bone and blood.
"I have," she said, "but it was of no good. He could not help me—no one can. It is as he said—one must choose."