“Did you let my husband know you were coming?  Does he know you are in Egypt?”

In saying this her voice became more ugly, less like hers, as if the emotion that governed her just then made a crescendo, became more vital and more complex.

“No.  I left England unexpectedly.  A sudden impulse!”

He was speaking almost apologetically, without meaning to do so.  He realized this, and pulled himself up sharply.

“I told no one of my plans.  I thought I would give Nigel a surprise.”

He said it coolly, with quite a different manner.

“Nigel!” she said.

Isaacson was aware when she spoke that he had called his friend by his Christian name for the first time.

“I thought I would give you and your husband a surprise.  I hope you forgive me?”

After what seemed to him an immensely long time she answered: 

“What is there to forgive?  Everybody comes to the Nile.  One is never astonished to see any one turn up.”

Her voice this time was no longer ugly.  It began to have some of the warm and the lazy charm that he had found in it when he met her in London.  But the charm sounded deliberate, as if it was thrust into the voice by a strong effort of her will.

“I use the word ‘see,’” she added.  “But really here one can’t see any one or anything properly.  Let us go out.”

And she passed out of the sanctuary into the dim but less dark hall that lay beyond.  Isaacson followed her.

In the slightly stronger light he looked at her swiftly.  Already she was putting up her hands to a big white veil, which she had pushed up over her large white hat.  Before it fell, obscuring, though not concealing her, he had seen that her face was not made up and that it was deadly pale.  But that pallor might be natural.  Always in London he had seen her made up, and always made up white.  Possibly her face, when unpowdered, unpainted, was white, too.

In the hall she stood still once more.

“You are an extraordinary person, Doctor Isaacson,” she said.  “Do you know it?  I don’t think any one else would come out suddenly like this to a place where he had a friend, without letting the friend know.  Really, if it were not you, one might think it quite oddly surreptitious.”

She finished with a little laugh.

“I think Nigel will be very much surprised,” she added.

“I hope you don’t mean unpleasantly surprised?  As I told you, I intended—­”

“Oh, yes, I know all that,” she interrupted.  “But surely, it seems—­well, almost a little bit unfriendly to be on the Nile and never to let him know.  And I suppose—­how long have you been in Egypt?”

“Oh, a very short time.  You must not think I’ve delayed.  On the contrary—­”

“If you had delayed, it would have been quite reasonable.  You have never seen Egypt before, have you?”

“Never.”