This is evidently the official letter with reference to his post—­the post that means to him but this one thing:  her possession.

He bursts it open, and in less than two seconds his eye takes in its news:  he has the appointment.

The blood leaps over his face, and an exultant fire runs through his frame and along his veins.

He replaces the letter quietly in its cover with but the slightest tremor of his fingers.

Then he gets up from the bedside and stands in the middle of the room, looking through the sparkling panes.

“I have her!” he is thinking.  “Yes, by God! at last I have her!”

The day is glorified; life is transfigured.

Through his whole body mounts that boundless exhilaration of desire on the point of satisfaction.  Not momentary desire, easily and recently awakened, but the long desire that has been goaded and baited to fury through weeks and months of repression, and tempered to a terrible acuteness in pain and suffering, like steel by flame.

And now triumph, and a delight beyond expression, bounds like an electrified pulse throughout all his strong, vigorous frame.

The lines seem to fade from his face, the mouth relaxes, and then he laughs, as he makes a step towards the window, flings it open, and leans out into the keen air.

“At last I can speak out decently.  No one could think I cared for her money, or any of that rot now.  How unexpected!—­this morning!  Now I can tell her I’m free, independent!  I am glad I waited—­it was much better.  Far better, as I said, to be patient.  Last night I almost—­and now I’m very glad I didn’t.”

He draws his head back, and turns to the glass to shave with a light heart.

As he does so, he sees her letter again, and picks it up.  “You darling!” he thinks, “I’ll make you understand all now.”

Some miles westward of the pier, some fathoms deep, out of reach of the quiet sunlight lying on the surface, tosses the girl’s body, senseless and pulseless, with all the million possibilities of pleasure that filled those keen nerves and supple limbs gone out of them for ever, and Stephen draws out her despairing letter of eternal farewell, with a smile lighting up his handsome, pleasing face.

“Yes, it was much better to wait,” he murmurs, “I don’t approve of rushing things!”

III

CHAPTER I

It was morning on the Blue Nile.  The turbulent blue river rolled joyously between its banks, for it was high Nile, and a swift, light breeze was blowing—­the companion of the Dawn.  The vault of the sky seemed arched at a great height above the earth, springing clearly, without any object to break the line from the horizon of gold sand, and full of those white, filmy, light-filled gleaming clouds that are one of the wonders and glories of Upper Egypt and the Soudan.  It was a morning and a scene to make a man’s heart rise high in his breast, and cry out, as his eyes turned from the level-sanded desert floor, through sunlit space, to the vaulted roof, “After all, the world is a good house to live in.”