"Wolff!" The name burst almost angrily from Nora’s lips. "How should he have suffered? Men of his stamp do not suffer. They have no room in their lives for such a feeling. Do you know—after that ball, when he had practically thrown Miles out of the house, when he knew that I was miserable, broken-hearted, he left me without a word, and worked with his door locked between us. He cared nothing—nothing—only for his ambition and himself. They are all like that, and their wives are just their servants, who must be satisfied with whatever is left over for them. _I_ could not stand it. It was like living with some piece of machinery——" "Nora, he is your husband, and you loved him!" Nora sprang to her feet. The reproach had stung her, the more so because at the bottom she knew that her indignation was feigned. The panic and delirium of that night was over, and left her terribly calm, terribly cold, terribly clear as to what she had done. "I did love him," she said—"or at least I thought I did. It is all the same thing. I was carried off my feet by the strangeness and newness of it all. How should I have known then what it meant to leave one’s country and one’s people? Leave them! If that had been all! But to go against them, to have to forget that one had ever loved them!" She was trying to rouse herself to those feelings which had been the cause of all her past misery and whose crisis had brought about the final desperate action. She was trying to rouse in her mother sympathy for those feelings, and it goaded her to know that both efforts failed. Mrs. Ingestre was gazing out of the window, and her pale face was still grave and pitiful. "You see things with your own eyes, my Nora," she said, with a faint, wistful smile. "I see them from a long way off, and with eyes that suffering has cleared from all prejudice and hatred. And then—I was very fond of Wolff." Nora turned away, her small hands clenched. "That—that means I have done wrong?" she said almost fiercely. "Have I blamed you?" "No, but——" "I can have pity for both, Nora. I can see that you had much to bear—perhaps more than was tolerable for one so young and headstrong. But I can see Wolff’s side too. I can see him come home that night and find you gone——" She stopped as though her imagination had led her before a sorrow for which she found no words, and Nora too was silent. Profoundly embittered and disappointed, she stood looking at the still beautiful face of the woman in whose sympathy she had had implicit trust. Was, then, everything to fail her, even in her home, the home which she had seen in her exile’s dreams? Was she to stand alone? Was there no one who would understand her and all that she had endured? "When Miles believed that war had broken out he would not stay an hour longer," she said at last, and her voice had a defiant note. "He could not bear to be away from his own country. Why should I, because I am a woman, feel less than he?"