She did not ask that Nora should come too. She did not even mention Nora’s name. Wolff remembered that significant omission as he trudged homewards, and he understood that Nora stood alone. She had lost touch with his friends and with those nearest to him, and he too had drifted out of her life. Such, then, was the end of a love and a union which was to have been endless! A few months of untroubled happiness, and the awakening! He felt no anger mingle itself with his grief, rather an intense pity. Though he could not understand her conduct in the past, he trusted her with the blindness of an unchanged devotion. He believed that she would have some explanation. He was sure that once at least her love had been sincere, that she deceived herself more than she had ever deceived him. She had believed her love for him stronger than that for home and people, than any other love. She had been mistaken—that was all. An old love had returned into her life and with it the old ties. The intoxication of the first passion was over, and she had gone back to those to whom she belonged, and a sea of racial prejudice, racial differences, and national feeling divided her from the man to whom she had sworn, "Thy God shall be my God, thy people my people." He had lost her. What then? What was to be the solution to the problem that lay before them both? He knew of none, and perhaps at the bottom of his heart there was still a glimmer of hope that he was mistaken and her friendship for Arnold no more than friendship, her change towards him no more than a passing shadow. He told himself that when worried and overworked as he was, a man can too easily exaggerate the extent of a misfortune. Who knew what change for the better the next few hours might bring? Thus he reached his home with a lighter heart than he had expected. Nora was not yet back from the parade. It surprised him, therefore, to hear loud and apparently angry voices proceeding from his room. He entered quickly, without waiting to lay sword or helmet aside, and found Miles and another older man, whose appearance warranted the supposition that his descent from the Mosaic family was unbroken. Wolff looked from one to the other, and perhaps his knowledge of both classes of men warned him of what was to come. "Might I ask for an explanation?" he said quietly. Miles was clinging to the back of a chair and trembling from head to foot, either with fear or rage or a mixture of both. His usually sallow face was now grey and his lips twitched convulsively before he managed to answer. "I’m beastly sorry, Wolff," he stammered. "It’s the devil of a nuisance, and I swear I never meant to bring you into the mess. This—this man has come fussing about some money. I told him to wait, but he seems to have got some idiotic ideas in his head——"