As Isaacson stepped upon the Oriental rugs which covered the deck, this young man gently pushed up his hat, looked, let his legs quietly down, and getting on his feet, said: 

“Doctor Isaacson?”

“Yes,” said Isaacson coming up to him.

The young man held out his hand with a nonchalant gesture.

“Glad to meet you.  I’m Doctor Baring Hartley, in charge of this sunstroke case aboard here.  Came down to-day from Assouan to see how my patient was getting on.  Will you have a cigarette?”

“Thanks.”

Doctor Isaacson accepted one.

“Fine air at Assouan!  This your first visit to the Nile?”

The young man spoke with scarcely a trace of American accent.  With his hat set back, he was revealed as brown-faced, slightly freckled, with very thick, dark hair, that was parted in the middle and waved naturally, though it looked as if it had been crimped; a small moustache, rather bristling, because it had been allowed only recently to grow on a lip that had often been shaved; a round, rather sensual chin; and large round eyes, in colour a yellow-brown.  In these eyes the character of the man was very clearly displayed.  They were handsome, and not insensitive; but they showed egoism, combined with sensuality.  He looked very young, but was just over thirty.

“Yes, it’s my first visit.”

“Won’t you sit down?”

He spoke with the ease of a host, and sank into his deck chair, laying his hat down upon his knees and stretching out his legs, from which he pulled up the white ducks a little way.  Isaacson sat down on a smaller chair, leaned forward, and said, in a very practical, businesslike voice: 

“No doubt Mr. or Mrs. Armine—­or both of them, perhaps, has explained how I have come into this affair?  I’m an old friend of your patient.”

“So I gathered,” said Doctor Hartley, in a voice that was remarkably dry.

“I knew him long before he was married, very long before he was ever a sick man, and being out here, and hearing about this sudden and severe illness, of course I called to see how he was.”

“Very natural.”

“Probably you know my name as a London consulting physician.”

“Decidedly.  Your success, of course, is great, Doctor Isaacson.  Indeed, I wonder you are able to take a holiday.  I wonder the ladies will let you go.”

He smiled, and touched his moustache affectionately.

“Why the ladies, especially?”

“I understood your practice lay chiefly among the neurotic smart women of London.”

“No.”

Isaacson’s voice echoed the dryness of Doctor Hartley’s.

“I’m sorry.”

“May I ask why?”

“On the other side of the water we find them—­shall I say the best type of patients?”

“Ah!”

Isaacson remembered the sentence of Mrs. Armine which had sent him straight to the sick man.  He seemed to detect her cruel prompting in the half-evasive yet sufficiently clear words just spoken.