"Nora, what is wrong?" he went on. "Why wouldn’t you see me? Have I offended you in any way?" "Offended me!" She laughed brokenly. "Do I look offended, Robert? Don’t you know I could have danced for joy when I saw you coming?" Reckless Nora! Her words, spoken in a moment of relief from an agonising pressure, had not the meaning which he believed he read out of them. Something was not any longer so selfless, so resigned, flashed into his steady grey eyes. "Then what is it, Nora? Tell me everything. You know you have promised me your friendship." She did not hesitate an instant. Those three hours beneath the enemy’s fire had driven her to exasperation, to that point of hysterical nervousness from which most feminine folly is committed. "They forbade my seeing you," she said—"not in words; but they said things which left me no choice. They said I was bringing disgrace upon my husband, and upon his name——" "Nora! Who said that?" "Frau von Arnim. She hates me. And Wolff said much the same. They can’t understand a straight, honest friendship between a man and a woman." "You mean it was because of me?" "Yes. Of course Frau von Arnim knows everything about—about the past, and she believes—oh, it is too horrid what she believes. We don’t need to think about it. She has not told Wolff. If she had he would have turned me out of the house or locked me up in the cellar. None of them—not even he—can understand. Oh, Robert, you don’t know how hard it was to have to send you away! You and Miles are the only people in all this big city to whom I can turn." Arnold sat silent, staring in front of him. His pulses were beating with a growing, suffocating excitement. He knew by every tone of her voice, by every glance of her stormy, miserable eyes, that she was in his power, that he had but to make the appeal and she would follow him out of the room whithersoever he led her. The knowledge touched his steady-flowing blood with fever—in the same moment he was conscious of remorse and shame. He had lingered at her side against every behest of wisdom and honour, deceiving himself and her with an assumption of loyal, disinterested friendship. It was no friendship. Those who had judged it by another name had judged rightly. He had come between husband and wife, he was at that very moment, willingly or unwillingly, playing the part of tempter in the devil’s comedy. "Nora," he began, "perhaps I have done you harm. Perhaps I ought not to have come to-night." "I don’t care!" she retorted recklessly. "I don’t care whether anything is right or wrong. When you came I was desperate. I hate every one here. It is awful to feel that I belong to them. I want to get away from here—home, to England." "Nora—for God’s sake!" He was frightened now—of her and of himself. "You must not talk like that. Your home is here with your husband."