“Hush!”

He held up his hand.  The Nubians lay on their oars, surprised.  The singing died in their throats.

Across the water there came a faint but shrill sound of laughter.  Some one was laughing, laughing, laughing, in the night.

The Nubians stared at each other, the man who was stroke turning his head towards his companion.

Faint cries followed the laughter, and then—­was it not the sound of a woman, somewhere sobbing dreadfully?

Isaacson listened till it died away.

Then, with a stern, tense face, he nodded to the Nubians.

They bent again to the oars, and the felucca dropped down the Nile.

XXXVI

When she had sent her note to the Fatma, Mrs. Armine had secretly telegraphed to Doctor Hartley, begging him to come to the Loulia as quickly as possible.  She had implied to Isaacson that he would arrive about four the next day.  Perhaps she had forgotten, or had not known how the trains ran from Assouan.

However that was, Doctor Hartley arrived many hours before the time mentioned by Mrs. Armine for a consultation, and was in full possession of the case and in command of the patient while Isaacson was still on the Fatma.

Isaacson had not slept all night.  That dream of the Nile into which he had softly sunk was gone, was as if it never had been.  His instinct was to start for the Loulia at daybreak.  But for once he denied this instinct.  Cool reason spoke in the dawn saying, “Festina lente.”  He listened.  He held himself in check.  After his sleepless night, in which thought had been feverish, he would spend some quiet, lonely hours.  There was, he believed, no special reason, after the glance he had sent to Mrs. Armine just before he went out of Nigel’s cabin, why he should hurry in the first hour of the new day to the sick man he meant to cure.  Let the sleeping draught do its work, and let the clear morning hours correct any fever in his own mind.

And so he rested on deck, while the sun climbed the pellucid sky, and he watched the men at the shaduf.  The sunlight struck the falling water and made it an instant’s marvel.  And the marvel recurred, for the toil never ceased.  The naked bodies bent and straightened.  The muscles stood out, then seemed to flow away, like the flowing water, on the arms under the bronze-coloured skin.  And from lungs surely made of brass came forth the fierce songs that have been thrown back from the Nile’s brown banks perhaps since the Sphinx first set his unworldly eyes towards eternity.

But though Isaacson deliberately paused to get himself very thoroughly and calmly in hand, paused to fight with possible prejudice and drive it out of him, he did not delay till the hour fixed by Mrs. Armine.  Soon after one o’clock in the full heat of the day, he set out in the tiny tub which was the only felucca on board of the Fatma, and he took Hassan with him.  Definitely why he took Hassan, he perhaps could not have stated.  He just thought he would take him, and did.