Hamza was dressed in white, with a white turban.  His arms hung at his sides.  His thin hands, the fingers opened, made two dark patches against his loose and graceful robe.  His dark face, seen in the night, and by the light which came from the room of the faskeeyeh, was like an Eastern dream.  In his eyes lay a still fanaticism.  Those eyes drew something in Isaacson.  He felt oddly at home with them, without understanding what they meant.  And he thought of the hashish-smoker, and he thought of the garden of oranges, surrounding the little secret house, to which the hashish-smoker sometimes came.  These Easterns dwell apart—­yes, despite the coming of the English, the so-called “awakening” of the East—­in a strange and romantic world, an enticing world.  Had Bella Donna undergone its charm?  Unconsciously his eyes were asking this question of this Eastern who had been to Mecca, who prayed—­how many times a day!—­and was her personal attendant.  But the eyes gave him no answer.  He came a little nearer to Hamza, stood by the rail, and offered him a cigarette.  Hamza accepted it, with a soft salute, and hid it somewhere in his robe.  They remained together in silence.  Isaacson was wondering if Hamza spoke any English.  He looked full of secrets, that were still and calm within him as standing water in a sequestered pool, sheltered by trees in a windless place.  Starnworth, perhaps, would have understood him—­Starnworth who understood at least some of the secrets of the East.  And Isaacson recalled Starnworth’s talk in the night, and his parting words as he went away—­“A different code from ours!”

And the secret of the dahabeeyah, of the beautiful Loulia—­was it locked in that breast of the East?

In the silence Isaacson’s mind sought converse with Hamza’s, strove to come into contact with Hamza’s mind.  But it seemed to him that his mind was softly repelled.  Hamza would not recognize the East that was in Isaacson, or perhaps he felt the Jew.  When the voice of Mrs. Armine was heard from the threshold of the lighted chamber these two had not spoken a word.  But Isaacson had learnt that in any investigation of the past, in any effort to make straight certain crooked paths, in any search after human motives, he would get no help from this mind that was full of refusal, from this soul that was full of prayer.

“Doctor Isaacson!”

A dress rustled.

“You are out here—­with Hamza?”

She stood in one of the doorways.

“Will you please come and give my husband the sleeping draught?”

“Certainly.”

When they were in the room by the fountain she said: 

“Of course, you know, this is all wrong.  We’re not doing the right thing by Doctor Hartley at all.  But I don’t like to thwart Nigel.  Convalescents are always wilful.”

“Convalescents!” he said.

“Yes, convalescents.”

“You think your husband is convalescent?”