The rest of the drive passed in silence, and once in the ball-room, Nora lost sight of her brother completely. He drifted off by himself, whither and with whom she could not think, for she knew that he had no friends in the brilliant crowd. She, too, was friendless, though there were many there who bowed to her and passed on, and for the first time she realised the full extent of her isolation. The Selenecks were not there, and she was glad of their absence: she would have hated them to have been witnesses of her loneliness. Those whom she knew, whose comradeship with her husband should have guaranteed a certain courtesy, passed her by. Nora cared nothing for them, but the humiliation stung her to the quick. She was English, and because she was English they insulted her, tacitly and deliberately. Not all the months in her husband’s country had taught her to understand that she had insulted them, that she had trampled on their pride of race, and scorned the customs and opinions which were their holiest possessions. It never occurred to her that the description of the scene of the previous afternoon had passed from lip to lip with the rapidity of lightning, and that in the eyes of that mighty brotherhood of soldiers, and of that still mightier sisterhood of their wives, she was branded as a renegade, as a woman who had spat upon her husband’s uniform, and exalted another race above that to which she belonged—a _Deutschfeindliche_, an enemy who masqueraded among them under a transparent guise of hypocritical friendship. Perhaps some pitied her; but for the most part they were the older men, whose experience taught them to be pitiful—and they were not present on this particular night. Even if they had been they could have done nothing to help her. She was an outcast, and for them she had made herself "unclean." Thus poor Nora, still young and headstrong in all her emotions, her sensibilities raw with the events of the last weeks, stood alone and watched the scene before her with eyes from which the tears were held back by the strength of pride alone. There must have been considerably over two hundred guests present, almost exclusively officers of lower rank, with here and there a civilian to throw the brilliant uniforms into more striking relief. Nora could not but be impressed by the tall, finely built men, with the strong-cut, bronzed faces, and in each she saw a dim reflection of her husband. There was perhaps no real resemblance, but they were of one type—they were German, and that one similarity aroused in her the old feeling of wild opposition against the man she loved, and whom she had sworn to stand by to the end. Her love for him was as genuine as her admiration for these, his brothers—as genuine as her hatred for him and for them all.