“You are coming back in the autumn?”

“For some days, in passing through.  I’m going to Egypt again.”

“I envy you—­I envy you.”

As he looked at Nigel’s Northern fairness, and thought of his own darkness, it seemed to him that he should be going to the sun, Nigel remaining in the lands where the light is pale.  Perhaps a somewhat similar thought occurred to Nigel, for he said: 

“You ought to go there some day.  You’d be in your right place there.  Have you ever been?”

“Never.  I’ve often wanted to go.”

“Why don’t you go?”

Isaacson’s mind asked that question, and his Jewishness replied.  He made money in London.  Every day he spent out of London was a loss of so much money.

“Some day,” Nigel continued, “you must take a holiday and see Egypt.”

“This winter?” said Isaacson.

He lifted the cover of a book.  His dark, shining, almost too intelligent eyes looked at Nigel, and looked away.

“Not this winter,” he added, quietly.

“But—­why not this winter?”

Nigel spoke with a slight embarrassment.

“I couldn’t get away.  I have too much work.  You’ll be in the Fayyum?”

Nigel was staring at the Oriental carpet.  His strong hands lay palm downwards on the arms of his chair, pressing them hard.

“I shall go there,” he replied.

“And live under the tent?  I met a man last night who knows you, an Egyptian army man on leave, Verreker.  He told me you were reclaiming quite a lot of desert.”

“I should like to reclaim far more than I ever can.  It’s a good task.”

“Hard work?”

“Deuced hard.  That’s why I like it.”

“I know; man’s love of taming the proud spirit.”

“Is it that?  I don’t think I bother much about what prompts me to a thing.  But—­I say, Isaacson, sometimes it seems to me that you have a devilish long sight into things, an almost uncanny long sight.”

He leaned forward.

“But in you I don’t mind it.”

“I don’t say I acknowledge it.  But why should you mind it in any one?”

Nigel quoted some words of Mrs. Chepstow, but Isaacson did not know he quoted.

“Hasn’t the brain a tendency to overshadow, to brow-beat the heart?” he said.  “Isn’t it often arrogant in its strength?”

“One must let both have an innings,” said Isaacson, smiling at the slang which suited him so little and suited Nigel so well.

“Yes, and I believe you do.  That’s why—­but to go on with what we were saying.  You’ve got a long sight into things.  Now, living generally, as you do, here in London, don’t you think that men and women living in crowds often get off the line of truth and kindness?  Don’t you think that being all together, backed up, as it were, by each other—­as a soldier is by his regiment when going into battle—­they often become hard, brutal, almost get the blood-lust into them at times?”