memory had cast about her old life became dull and faded. She saw now an ugly red-brick building, with dreary, silent rooms, and people with whom she had never been in sympathy save in her imagination. This last was the bitterest disappointment of all. In her anger against Wolff she had expected and believed so much of these "home people," and they had, after all, failed her. As she sat alone in the sad, empty room, she felt that those five days in England had taken from her not only the dearest hope but the last illusion. Her mother had said, "You do not belong here," and it was true. She was an exile in this narrow little world, and between her father and herself there was an insurmountable barrier of taste and thought. It had always been there, just as, like her mother, she had always been an exile, but in her girlhood’s days it had been less pronounced, less clearly defined. Now that she had had experience in another world, she could no longer bear the trammels of her father’s conventional prejudices. She had hated and despised her mode of life at Wolff’s side; she began to see, though dimly, that it had had at least its great moments, that it was at least inspired by a great idea worthy of the sacrifices it demanded. Here there was no sacrifice and no idea—only vegetation, and her companion was not even a useful machine. He was a weak muddler, and his world was a little village which muddled along in a muddle-loving country and believed great things of itself and its institutions. Just as Nora had found the squire ridiculous with his two-week soldiers, so her father irritated her with his mingled piety, pusillanimity, and timid self-satisfaction. Not even their common grief had brought them together. They had stood wordless by their dead, and when the Rev. John had seemed about to speak, she had fled from him, dreading that his words might destroy the impression which the serene sleeper had made upon her mind. Since then they had hardly spoken, and Miles had wandered between them like a sullen, dissatisfied ghost. Somehow, he felt that his influence over Nora was at an end, that from the moment her feet had touched her native soil she had turned from him and his explanations with something like repugnance. He did not trouble to seek the reason—indeed, she could have given him none; but the shadow between them threw Nora back into even deeper loneliness. And the wonder which had come into her life—the miracle which had been revealed to her in her mother’s eyes? She only knew that its revelation had come too late. Though all that was best and noblest in her stirred as if beneath some divine touch, she felt none of the exultation, none of the sanctified happiness which might have been hers. The gift which was to come to her was like a golden link in a broken chain, like a jewel without setting—beautiful but imperfect. She was indeed an exile and bore the exile’s curse.