“You don’t mean to say,” she at length said, “that you think anything—­that you suppose one of the servants—­Ibrahim—­Hamza—?  I can’t believe it!  I could never believe it!”

“Do you wish me to cure your husband?”

“Of course I wish him to be cured.”

“Then please go now and tell him that you have asked me to stay here for the night.  I don’t want him to see me to-night.  I will see him as soon as he wakes to-morrow.”

“But—­he doesn’t—­”

“Just as you like!  Either I stay here and take charge of this case, or I go back to the boat at Edfou and to-morrow I put myself into communication with the proper authorities.”

She got up again slowly.

“Well, if you really believe you can pull Nigel round quickly!” she said.

She moved to the door.

“I’ll see what he says!” she murmured.

Then she opened the door and went out.

That night Isaacson sent Hassan back to the Fatma to fetch some necessary luggage.  For Mrs. Armine succeeded in persuading her husband to submit to a doctor’s visit the next morning.

Isaacson had not been worsted.  But as he went into one of the smart little cabins to get some sleep if possible, he felt terribly, almost unbearably, depressed.

For what was—­what must be—­the meaning of this victory?

XL

Isaacson had asked himself at night the meaning of his victory.  When the morning dawned, when once more he had to go to his work, the work which was his life, although sometimes he was inclined to decry it secretly in moments of fatigue, he asked no further questions.  His business was plain before him, and it was business into which he could put his heart.  Although he was not an insensitive man, he was a man of generous nature.  He pushed away with an almost careless energy those small annoyances, those little injuries of life, which more petty people make much of and cannot easily forgive.  The querulous man who was ready, out of his bodily weakness and his mis-directed love, to make little of his friendship, even to thrust away his proffered help, he disregarded as man, regarded as so much nearly destroyed material which he had to repair, to bring back to its former flawlessness.  He knew the real nature, the real soul of the man; he understood why they were warped, and he put himself aside, put his pride into his pocket, which he considered the proper place for it at that moment.  But though he had gained his point by a daring half-avowal of what his intuition had whispered to him, he presently realized that if he were to win through with Nigel into the sunshine, he must act with determination; perhaps, too, with a cunning which the Eastern drops in his blood made not so unnatural to him as it might have been to most men as honest living as he was.