It was very seldom that Isaacson changed colour; but at these words his dark face slowly reddened.

“If you suppose that—­that I want to make money—­” he began.

“It’s always nice, if one takes a holiday, to be able to pay one’s expenses.  But I know you won’t run Nigel in for too much.”

Isaacson got up.  His instinct was to go, to get away at once from this woman.  For a moment he forgot the voice he had heard in the night; he forgot the words it had said.  His egoism and his pride spoke, and told him to get away.

She read him.  She got up, too, came away from her place near the door, and said, with a smile: 

“You are going?”

He looked at her.  He saw in her eyes the look he had seen in them when he had bade her good-bye at the Savoy after his useless embassy.

“You are going?”

“Yes,” he said.  “I am!  Going to see your husband!”

And before she could speak or move, he was at the door through which Hamza had passed; he had opened it and disappeared, shutting it softly behind him.

XXXV

With such abrupt and adroit decisiveness had Meyer Isaacson acted, so swift and cunning had been his physical carrying out of his sudden resolve—­a resolve, perhaps, determined by her frigid malice—­that for a moment Mrs. Armine lost all command of her powers—­even, so it seemed, all command of her thoughts and desires.  When the door shut and she was alone, she stood where she was and at first did not move a finger.  She felt dull, unexcited, almost sleepy, and as one who is dropping off to sleep sometimes aimlessly reiterates some thought, apparently unconnected with any other thought, unlinked with any habit of the mind, she found herself, in imagination, with dull eyes, seeing the Arabic characters above the doorway of the Loulia, dully and silently repeating the words Baroudi had chosen as the motto of the boat in which this thing—­Isaacson’s departure to Nigel—­had happened: 

“The fate of every man have we bound about his neck.”

So it was.  So it must be.  With an odd and almost grotesque physical response to the meaning which at this moment she but vaguely apprehended, she let her body go.  She shrank a little, drawing her shoulders forward, like one on whom a burden that is heavy is imposed.  About her neck had been bound this fate.  But the movement, slight though it was, recalled the woman who had defied and had bled the world—­had defied the world of women, and had bled the world of men.  And, like a living thing, there sprang up in her mind the thought: 

“I’m the only woman on board this boat.”

And she squared her shoulders.  The numbness passed, or she flung it angrily from her.  And she had the door open and was through the doorway in an instant, and crying out in the long corridor that led to the room of the faskeeyeh: