The Rev. John sighed resignedly.
"I said so myself," he answered; "but they were so determined that I could do nothing. It was a terrible blow to me."
"It made me sick when I was there," Miles interposed viciously, "to think that I had to be civil to those boors because my sister had married one of them. I tell you, I blessed the war. It gave one the chance to pay back."
"You! What could you have done?"
The question came from Nora, and her voice sounded curiously unsteady.
Miles nodded.
"I could have done a lot more than you think, my dear sister," he said pointedly. "I could have put more than one spoke in your fine baron's wheel if I had chosen. And glad I should have been to have done it—swaggering bully that he was!"
"Miles—you forget—you are speaking of my husband!"
She was leaning a little forward. Her cheeks were hot and her eyes alight with a passion which should have warned him. But Miles merely laughed.
"Your husband? My dear girl, I expect he has divorced you by now as a runaway and I don't know what else besides. They are pretty summary with that sort of thing in the Fatherland. Imagine"—he turned to the squire—"they treat their women-folk like underpaid servants. The fine gentlemen go about in their many-coloured coats, and the wives can patch together what they can on nothing a year. Poor wretches!"