Yet so it was, for the very next morning, I wrote to my father saying I had been unwell and begging him to use his influence with my husband to set out on the Egyptian trip without further delay.

My father’s answer was prompt.  What he had read between the lines of my letter I do not know; what he said was this—­

“Daughter—­Certainly!  I am writing to son-in-law telling him to quit London quick.  I guess you’ve been too long there already.  And while you are away you can draw on me yourself for as much as you please, for where it is a matter of money you must never let nobody walk over you.

     Yours—­&c.”

The letter to my husband produced an immediate result.  Within twenty-four hours, the telephone was at work with inquiries about trains and berths on steamers; and within a week we were on our way to Marseilles to join the ship that was to take us to Port Said.

Our state-rooms were on the promenade deck of the steamer with a passage-way between them.  This admitted of entirely separate existences, which was well, for knowing or guessing my share in our altered arrangements, my husband had become even more morose than before, and no conversation could be sustained between us.

He spent the greater part of his time in his state-room, grumbling at the steward, abusing his valet, beating his bad-tempered terrier and cursing the luck that had brought him on this senseless voyage.

More than ever now I felt the gulf that divided us.  I could not pass one single hour with him in comfort.  My life was becoming as cold as an empty house, and I was beginning to regret the eagerness with which I had removed my husband from a scene in which he had at least lived the life of a rational creature, when an unexpected event brought me a thrill of passing pleasure.

Our seats in the saloon were at the top of the doctor’s table, and the doctor himself was a young Irishman of three or four-and-twenty, as bright and breezy as a March morning and as racy of the soil as new-cut peat.

Hearing that I was from Ellan he started me by asking if by chance I knew Martin Conrad.

“Martin Conrad?” I repeated, feeling (I hardly knew why) as if a rosy veil were falling over my face and neck.

“Yes, Mart Conrad, as we call him.  The young man who has gone out as doctor with Lieutenant ——­’s expedition to the South Pole?”

A wave of tender feeling from my childhood came surging up to my throat and I said: 

“He was the first of my boy friends—­in fact the only one.”

The young doctor’s eyes sparkled and he looked as if he wanted to throw down his soup-spoon, jump up, and grasp me by both hands.

“God bless me, is that so?” he said.

It turned out that Martin and he had been friends at Dublin University.  They had worked together, “roomed” together, and taken their degrees at the same time.