Nora sat by the window and mended stockings. There was not very much light, for although it was still early afternoon and the winter sun stood high in the heavens, very few rays found their way into the fourth-floor rooms of No. 22, Adler Strasse. As Miles had said more than once, it was a poky hole. Nora remembered his words as she worked, and she looked up and studied the tiny apartment with a wondering regret. Yes; it was dark and poky; but why did the fact strike her so clearly and so constantly? Why was she doomed to see everything and everybody with another’s eyes? For that was what had happened to her. One short month ago, this place had been her paradise, her own particular little Eden, and now it was a "poky hole"—because Miles had said so and because her common sense told her that he was right. Had, then, the magic which had blinded her against the reality ceased to act its charm—or altogether lost its power? Surely not. Her eyes fell on her husband’s writing-table, with its burden of neatly arranged books and papers, and something in her softened to wistful tenderness. In her imagination she saw him sitting there, bent over his work in all-absorbed interest. She saw the thoughtful, knitted brows, the strong white hand guiding the pen through the intricacies of plans and calculations, the keen, searching eyes which were never stern for her, which, if they no longer flashed with the old unshadowed laughter, were always filled with the same unshaken, unaltered love. And she in her turn loved him. That she knew. There, and there alone, her brother’s barbed shafts had fallen short, or had broken harmless against the steeled walls of defence. Her husband was still what he had always been—the one and only man who had ever counted in her life. But there was a difference. What the difference was she could not tell. Perhaps just that change had come into her love which had come into his eyes. It was still a great love, still unshaken, but it had lost the power of glorying in itself, of being happy, of rejoicing in its own strength and youth and unity. When Wolff entered the room her pulses quickened, but it was with a curious, inexplicable pain, and when he went away she breathed more easily. That most wonderful and rare of moments when they had thought and felt and lived as though they were one mind, one body, one soul had passed—perhaps for ever. They stood on different shores and looked at each other over the dividing stream with sad eyes of love and hopeless regret.