How had it all come? Whose fault was it? Poor Nora felt she knew. The spectre had risen in the same hour when Miles had leant back in the _Drotschke_ and sighed with relief because Wolff had not accompanied them. She had been angry at first, but the rough words had revealed something to her which she would never otherwise have believed, something in herself which had lain dormant and which now awoke, never to rest again. It was not Miles’s fault. Had it been, she would not have hesitated to follow her mother’s advice. But to have sent him away would be a sign of weakness—and it would be useless. The evil—whatsoever it was—lay in herself. It had always been there, but she had not recognised it. Miles had shown her what she must sooner or later have seen for herself. She had married a stranger from a strange land, and he had remained a stranger, and the land had not become her home. That was the whole matter. That she loved him, that his country had offered her love and welcome did not alter the one great fact that the faintest cry, the faintest call from her own people had drawn from her an irrepressible answer of unchanged allegiance. She loved Wolff, but in every petty conflict between him and her brother her heart had sided against him; she had had a sincere affection for the Selenecks, and in cold blood she knew that Miles had behaved boorishly towards them; but she had grown to hate them because they had shown their disapproval, and because _he_ hated them. In this strange, unseen conflict of influences Miles stood for more than her brother; he stood for her whole race, for every inborn prejudice and opinion, and his coming had revealed to her her own loneliness. She was alone in a foreign land; she spoke a tongue which was not her tongue; she lived a life in which she was, and must remain, a tolerated stranger. Her seeming compliance had been no more than youth’s adaptability to a passing change. Her love and her ready enthusiasm had blinded her, but Miles had torn down the scales from her eyes, and she saw the life she lived as he saw it—as a weary round of dismal pleasures, big sacrifices, endless struggle. She saw that her home was poor and tasteless, that her friends were neither elegant nor interesting, that they had other ideas, other conceptions of things which to Nora were vitally important—that they were, in a word, foreigners to her blood and up-bringing.