"Let us get away from this crowd," she said hurriedly. "We can’t talk here."
He gave her his arm and led her to one of the supper-tables that were placed beneath the gallery.
"We can pretend to want coffee, or something of the sort," he said. "No one will disturb us."
She looked across and smiled at him with a fleeting radiance. Oh, that English voice, that English face! Laughter of relief and thankfulness fought with the tears that had so long lain checked, and now struggled for release beneath the touch of a friend’s unspoken sympathy.
"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——"
"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."
"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.
