“That is what I don’t wish you to do.”

“Don’t?  You mean, go away with you without—?”

“I mean, without Mrs. Armine.”

“Leave my wife?”

“Leave Ruby?  Desert her after all she’s done for me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Isaacson said nothing.

Nigel looked at Isaacson in silence for what seemed to Isaacson a long time—­minutes.  Then his face slowly flushed, was suffused with blood up to his forehead.  It seemed to swell, as if there was a pressure from within outwards.  Then the blood retreated, leaving behind it a sort of dark pallor, and the eyes looked sunken in their sockets.

“You—­you dare to think—­you dare to—­to say—?” he stammered.

“I say that you must come away from Mrs. Armine.  Don’t ask me to say why.”

“You—­you liar!  You damnable liar!”

He spoke slowly, in a low, husky voice.

“That you hated her, I knew that!  She told me that.  But that you—­that you should dare to—­”

His voice broke, and he stopped.  He leaned forward in his chair and made a gesture.

“Go!” he said.  “Get out!  If I—­if I were myself, I’d put you out.”

But Isaacson did not move.  He felt no anger, nothing but a supreme pity for this man who could not see, could not understand the truth of a nature with which he had held commune for so long, and, as he in his blindness believed, in such a perfect intimacy.  There was to the Doctor something shocking in such blindness, in such ignorance.  But there was something beautiful, too.  And to destroy beauty is terrible.

“If I am to go, you must hear me first,” he said, quietly.

“I won’t hear you—­not one word!”

Again there was the gesture towards the door.

“I have saved your life,” Isaacson said.  “And you shall hear me!”

And then, without waiting for Nigel to speak again, very quietly, very steadily, and with a great simplicity he told him what he had to tell.  He did not, even now, tell him all.  He kept secret the visit of Mrs. Chepstow to his consulting-room, and her self-revelation there.  And he did not mention Baroudi.  At this moment of crisis the man bred up in England fought against the Eastern Jew within Isaacson, and the Eastern Jew gave way.  But he described his visits to the Savoy, how the last time he had gone with the resolution to beg Mrs. Chepstow not to go to Egypt, not to link herself with his friend; how he had begun to speak, and how her cold irony, pitiless and serene, had shown him the utter futility of his embassy.  Then he came on to the later time, after the marriage and the departure, when he received his friend’s letter describing his happiness and his wonderful health, when he received soon afterwards that other letter from the lady patient, speaking of Nigel’s “extraordinary colour.”  He told how in London he had put those letters side by side and had compared them, and how some strong instinct of