She yawned again, and moved her shoulders.

“You are wronging me grossly, and you know it!” Isaacson said, in a very low voice.

He had laid his hat down on a little straw table.  Now he took it up.  What was the good of staying?  How could a decent man stay?  And yet the struggle within him was bitter.  If he could only have been certain of this man Hartley, perhaps there would have been no struggle.  He might have gone with an almost quiet heart.  Or if he had been certain of something else, absolutely certain, he might have remained and acted, completely careless in his defiance of the woman who hated him.  But though his instinct was alive, telling him things, whispering, whispering all the time; even though his observation had on the previous night begun to back up his instinct, saying, “Yes, you must be right!  You are right!” yet he actually knew nothing.  He knew nothing except that this young man, between whose hands lay Nigel’s life, was under the spell of Mrs. Armine.

He took up his hat and held it tightly, crushing the soft brim between his fingers.  Doctor Hartley was looking at him with the undisguised enmity of the egoist tricked.  He had had time to find out that Isaacson had begun subtly to induce him to do what he had refused to do.  If Mrs. Armine had not appeared unexpectedly, Nigel Armine’s case would have been, perhaps, pretty thoroughly discussed by the two doctors.

“Pushing trickster!”

His round eyes said that with all the vindictiveness of injured conceit.

“You are wronging me!” repeated Isaacson—­“wronging me shamefully!”

Was he going?  Yes, he supposed so.  Yet he did not go.

“It’s not a question of wronging any one,” she said.  “Facts are facts.”

Her face was ravaged with physical misery.  There was a battle going on between the sleeping draught she had taken and her will to be sleepless.  She moved her shoulders again, with a sort of shudder, sideways.

“Nigel doesn’t want you,” she said.

“How can you say that?  It’s not true.”

“It is true.  Isn’t it, Doctor Hartley?  Didn’t my husband—­”

She yawned again, and put down her hand on the back of a chair to which she held tightly.  “Didn’t he ask you to remain on board and look after the case?”

“Certainly!” cried the young man, eagerly drinking in her returning favour.  “Certainly!”

“Didn’t he ask you to ‘save him,’ as he called it, poor, dear fellow?”

“That was the very word!”

“And last night?” said Isaacson, fixing his eyes upon her.

“Last night you startled him to death, rushing in upon him without warning or preparation.  Wasn’t it a cruel, dangerous thing to do in his condition, Doctor Hartley?”

“Most cruel!  Unpardonably so!  If anything had occurred you ought to have been held responsible, Doctor Isaacson.”

“And then whatever it was you gave him, you forced it on him.  And he had a perfectly terrible night in consequence.”