He moved a step forward, and stood looking down on her.

“But I could prove it.”

“Oh—­how?”

“Meyer Isaacson knows it.”

He did not refer to his marrying her as a proof already given, for that might have meant something else than belief in the hidden unworldliness of her, and in her hidden desire for that which was good and beautiful.

“And don’t you—­don’t you know it, even after this morning?”

“After this morning—­I don’t want to hurt you—­but after this morning you will have to prove it to me, thoroughly prove it, or else I shall not believe it.”

The solo voice of the Nubian sailor was lost in the chorus of voices which came floating over the Nile.

“I don’t want to be cold,” she continued, “and I don’t want to be unkind, but one can’t help certain things.  I have been driven, forced, into scepticism about men.  I don’t want to go back into my life, I don’t want to trot out the old ‘more sinned against than sinning’ cliche.  I don’t mean to play the winey-piney woman.  I never have done that, and I believe I’ve got a little grit in me to prevent me ever doing it.  But such a thing as happened this morning must breed doubts and suspicions in a woman who has had the experience I have had.  I might very easily tell you a lie, Nigel.  I might very easily fall into your arms and say I’ve forgotten all about it, and I’ll never think of it again, and all that sort of thing.  It would be the simplest thing in the world for me to act a part to you.  But you’ve been good to me when I was lonely, and you’ve cared for me enough to marry me, and—­well, I won’t.  I’ll tell you the truth.  It’s this:  I can’t help knowing you did doubt me, and I’m not really a bit surprised, and I don’t know that I’d any right to be hurt; but whether I had any right or not, I was hurt, and it will take a little time to make me feel quite safe with you—­quite safe—­as one can only feel when the little bit of sincerity in one is believed in and trusted.”

She spoke quietly, but he felt excitement behind her apparent calm.  In her voice there was an inflexible sound, that seemed to tell him very clearly it meant what it was saying.

Always across the Nile came the song of the Nubian sailors.

“I’m not surprised that you feel like that,” he said.

He stood for a moment considering, then he sat down once more, and began to speak with a resolution that seemed to be prompted by passion.

“Ruby, to-day I think I was false to myself, because to-day I was false to my real, my deep-down belief in you.  In London I did think you cared for me as a man, not perhaps specially because I’d attracted you by my personality, but because I felt how others misunderstood you.  It seemed to me—­it seems to me now—­that I could answer to a desire in you to which no one else ever tried, ever wished to answer.  The others seemed to think you only wanted the things that don’t really count—­lots of money, luxury, jewels, clothes—­you know what I mean.  I felt that your real desire was—­well, I must put it plainly—­to be loved and not lusted after, to be asked for something, not only to be given things.  I felt that, I seemed to know it.  Wasn’t I right?”