"What has the fellow come about?" Miles demanded in a tone of injury. "One would think they were concocting a regular Guy Fawkes plot, with their shut doors and their whisperings—or making plans for the Invasion." Nora looked at her brother. He was lying full-length on the sofa, reading the latest paper from home; and as he had done very little else since he had lounged in to breakfast an hour late, complaining of a severe headache, Nora strongly suspected him of having varied the "Foreign Intelligence" with supplementary instalments of his night’s repose. "Is there any news?" she asked. She put the question with an effort, dreading the answer, and Miles grunted angrily. "Things don’t move much one way or the other," he said. "They stay as bad as they can be. The beggars won’t go for us—they’re funking it at the last moment, worse luck!" "Why ’worse luck’?" "Because it is time the cheek was thrashed out of them." He turned a little on one side, so as to be able to see his sister’s face. "What are you going to do when the trouble begins?" he asked. Nora’s head sank over her work. "I shall stay by my husband." "Poor old girl!" Nora made no answer. She was listening to the voices next door, and wondering what they were saying. Was Miles’s suggestion possible? Was it true that her husband sat before his table hour after hour absorbed in plans for her country’s ruin, his whole strength of mind and body set on the supreme task? And if so, what part did she play—she, his wife? "And you, Miles?" she asked suddenly. "What will you do?" He laughed uneasily. "If my Jew friend gives me the chance, I shall make a bolt for it," he said. "It’s a nuisance having all these confounded debts. I wish you weren’t so stand-offish with the Bauers, Nora. If you had only sugared them a little——" "Don’t!" she interrupted almost sternly. "Your debts must be paid somehow, but not that way. Wolff must be told." "Wolff!" He stared at her open-mouthed. "There is nothing else to be done, unless father can help you." "The pater won’t move a finger," Miles assured her. "And if you tell your righteous husband, there will be the devil of a row." He sat up rather abruptly as he spoke, for at that moment the study door opened, and Wolff and his visitor entered. Both men looked absorbed and tired, and Wolff’s usually keen eyes had an absent expression in them, as though he were mentally engaged in some affair of importance and difficulty. His companion, however, a tall, ungainly major whom Nora had always liked because of his openly-expressed admiration for her husband’s abilities, immediately assumed his manner of the gay and empty-headed cavalier.