Thus, when the first tempest of grief had passed she faced the future with the first fear turned to conviction. She had lost everything, even to her nationality. Those few months had been sufficient to imbue her, without her knowledge, with ideas and principles which made her a stranger in her own land. She could no longer admire without reservation; at every turn she was forced to compare and criticise with the same sharpness as she had compared and criticised in her German home, and a word against the people to whom she still theoretically belonged was sufficient to arouse the same indignation and resentment. Poor Nora! It was a bitter self-revelation which she had to face, and the only being who could have helped her in this conflict between the dual affections had been laid only a few hours before in the dreary churchyard whose walls she could distinguish through the leafless trees. The sight of those walls and the red spire of the church awakened her grief to its first intensity. She sprang up from her place by the empty sofa and hurried out of the room and out of the house. On her way she passed her father’s room. The door stood open, and she saw him seated by the table, with his face buried in his hands. She knew that he was crying, but she shrank swiftly away, with the horrible conviction that she despised him. She wondered if Wolff had cried when he had returned and found that she had left him. She felt sure that he had gone on working, and the picture which rose before her fancy of a strong, broad-shouldered man bent over his maps and plans in unswervable devotion caused her a strange sensation of relief. It was already late afternoon as she left the village behind her. She had no definite goal save the one to be alone, and beyond the range of prying, curious eyes, and almost unconsciously she chose the path over the fields where, months before, she had gone to meet Robert Arnold. Then it had been late summer, and it was now winter, but so vividly did the scene recur to her that when a tall, well-known figure strode out of the mists towards her, she could have believed that all the preceding months, with their condensed history of bewildering change, had been no more than an hallucination and that she was once more Nora Ingestre, setting out to learn the mysteries of her own heart. But the next instant her hand was taken, and she was looking into a familiar face which was yet so altered that she would have known alone from its lines of care and grief that time had moved on, bringing with him his inevitable burden. "Robert!" she cried. She saw his look of pain, and wondered at it. She did not know that he, too, had drawn the same comparison between then and now, and had been shocked by the change in the face which so short a time ago had been that of a girl—nay, almost of a child. "Poor little Nora!" he said under his breath. "Poor little Nora!"